UTF-8 vs. iso-8859-1

[web_design]

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using either of the following?
When I use utf-8 on one site, it first displays the site in Chinese
characters on Netscape 4... only with that one site. It immediately
switches back to English though...

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

 

[Toby Inkster]

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using either of the following?

The advantage of UTF-8 (which is a concrete representation of the more
abstract "Unicode" set of characters) is that it has vastly more
characters than ISO-8859-1.

The advantage of ISO-8859-1 is that is enjoys slightly wider support than
UTF-8.

If you don't require the extra characters offered by Unicode, then go with
ISO-8859-1.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

You should use whichever META tag most accurately reflects the character
set used by your page. That sounds useless and like I'm evading the
question, but it really is the best possible answer. (Except to say that
it's better to use a *real* HTTP header than this META tag.)

 

[jb]

UTF-8 will pass, 8859-1 will continue. Otherwise, they are practically
the same.

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

UTF-8 will pass, 8859-1 will continue. Otherwise, they are practically
the same.

You have no idea of what you are babbling about, have you? In that case,
please continue using the same forged From line before you get a clue.
Thank you in advance.

 

[Andreas Prilop]

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using either of the following?
When I use utf-8 on one site, it first displays the site in Chinese
characters on Netscape 4... only with that one site. It immediately
switches back to English though...
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

is a group outside the regular Usenet hierarchy.
It is carried by few servers - not by mine, for example.
I suggest to post to the regular Usenet group
news:comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html

To your question:
Read http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/checklist.html
and http://www.w3.org/International/O-HTTP-charset.html

If you have further questions, ask in
news:comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

The advantage of UTF-8 (which is a concrete representation of the more
abstract "Unicode" set of characters) is that it has vastly more
characters than ISO-8859-1.

That is true, but the repertoire of characters that you can use in an UTF-8
encoded HTML document is exactly the same the one you can use in an ISO-
8859-1 encoded document, namely UCS, the Universal Character Set, also
known as the Unicode character set. The reason is that you can use
character references like 〹 to overcome the limitations of the
encoding.

UTF-8 becomes advantageous with respect to ISO-8859-1 if you use _many_
characters outside the ISO-8859-1 repertoire.

The advantage of ISO-8859-1 is that is enjoys slightly wider support
than UTF-8.

Besides, ISO-8859-1 is more compact for most West European languages:
it uses one octet per character, whereas UTF-8 uses two octets for any
character in the upper half of the ISO-8859-1 repertoire.