[thelist] [TIP] - Use UTF-8 whenever possible, or get used to extra doses of caffeine.

kasimir-k evolt at kasimir-k.fi
Fri May 12 08:29:24 CDT 2006


T. R. Valentine scribeva in 12/05/2006 12:06:
> limit their URIs to the characters found in the English alphabet.

It just so happens that the alphabet used in English is included in 
quite a few other languages' alphabet - lowest common denominator so to 
speak. It could be said that it is not English alphabet that is used in 
URIs, but a character set common to widest possible group.

> ISTM the standardisation for URIs ought to be UTF. I think it
> reasonable to assume that English-only speakers will have no interest
> in visiting URIs they cannot even type such as özçelik.com, and if
> they are interested they will know how to use an alternate keyboard.

ISTM that this kind of assumptions are highly unreasonable! One's 
interest to any web site and one's ability to use alternate keyboard 
have nothing in common, they have zero correlation!

And I can easily imagine that I could say to my English only speaking 
friend: "Check out überpöh.net - just for the photos there!" So because 
my friend only speaks English, you say that she's not interested in 
those magnificent photos there...

> I thought UTF-8 was *not* a 'multi-byte character set' in the lower
> ranges (which equate with ASCII).

In 000000–00007F it indeed uses only one byte, 000080-10FFFF it uses two 
to four bytes.

.k



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