Re: UTF-8 vs. ISO-8859-1(5) ?

On Thu, Feb 20, 2003 at 06:21:20PM -0500, Steven T. Hatton wrote:

>
> I've been informed that others may have difficulty reading my posts because
> I've been using UTF-8 encoding. Is this true?

Some of your posts arrive as illegible gooblety gook on my linux system.

> I don't do Windoze so I really don't understand why people would would not be
> using, or atleast be able to use UTF-8, and switch between these encodings as
> required.

I have no idea what I would need to do to understand UTF-8. Given the number
of people who apparantly can't read it, I wouldn't want to do anything that
might result in my system sending out messages in that form.

I'm running redhat linux 7.1, using mutt as my mail client, with North American
settings.

> I'm able to read everything on the list except for my own posts when they are
> quoted back to me by a person not using UTF-8. For me, the idea of not using
> UTF-8 is dangerous. If I stick to UTF-8, I don't need to make special
> accomodations when I write code such as XML processing programs. I have lost
> weeks of valuable time fighting character encoding problems.

Why is UTF-8 better than whatever I'm getting by default? (One of the ISO
standards; I'm having trouble remembering the number right now, but it's
probably the ISO-8859-1 that you mention below.)

> Are there other people who feel as strongly about this issue as I do? Is it
> the consensus of the participants on this list that we should use
> ISO-8859-1(5)? This will be difficult for me to accomplish, but If I must,
> so be it.

--
Arlie

(Arlie Stephens arlie@...)