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POWhat encoding scheme should be used in a web project?
 

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  1. POWhat encoding scheme should be used in a web project?
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    <p>We are building a (Java) web project with Eclipse. By default Eclipse uses <code>Cp1252</code> encoding on Windows machines (which we use).</p> <p>As we also have developers in China (in addition to Europe), I started to wonder if that is really the encoding to use.</p> <p>My initial thought was to convert to <code>UTF-8</code>, because <em>"it supports all the character sets"</em>. However, is this really wise? Should we pick some other encoding instead? I see couple of issues:</p> <p>1) How do web browser interpret the files by default? Does it depend on what language version one is using? What I am after here is that should we verbosely declare the encoding schemes used:</p> <ul> <li>XHTML files can set the encoding verbosely using <code>&lt;?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8' ?&gt;</code> declarations.</li> <li>CSS files can set this by <code>@CHARSET "UTF-8";</code>.</li> <li>JavaScript files do not have in-file declarations, but one can globally define <code>&lt;meta http-equiv="Content-Script-Type" content="text/javascript; charset=utf-8"&gt;</code> or <code>&lt;script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"&gt;</code> for specific scripts.</li> </ul> <p>What if we leave CSS file without <code>@CHARSET "UTF-8";</code> declaration? How does the browser decide how it is encoded?</p> <p>2) Is it wise to use UTF-8, because it <em>is</em> so flexible. By locking our code into <code>Cp1252</code> (or maybe <code>ISO-8859-1</code>) I can ensure that foreign developers don't introduce special characters into files. This effectively prevents them from inserting Chinese comments, for example (we should use 100% english). Also, allowing UTF-8 can sometimes allow developers accidentally introduce some strange characters, that are difficult/impossible to perceive with human eye. This occurs when people, for example, copy-paste text or happen to press some weird keyboard combination accidentally.</p> <p>It would seem that allowing UTF-8 in the project just brings problems...</p> <p>3) For internatioanlization, I initially considered UTF-8 a good thing ("how can you add translations if the file encoding doesn't support the characters one needs?"). However, as it turned out, Java Resource Bundles (.properties files) <em>must</em> be encoded with ISO-8859-1, because otherwise they might break. Instead, the international characters are converted into <code>\uXXXX</code> notation, for example <code>\u0009</code> and the files are encoded with <code>ISO-8859-1</code>. So... we are not even able to use UTF-8 for this.</p> <p>For binary files... well, the encoding scheme doesn't really matter (I suppose one can say it doesn't even exist).</p> <p>How should we approach these issues?</p>
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    1. USTuukka Mustonen
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    1. COdid u read this http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
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    2. CO@ GustlyWind: I haven't read that specifically. I will check it out, thanks. @ Kwebble: Wikipedia states that "A resource bundle is a Java .properties file that contains locale-specific data" and that "The encoding of a .properties file is ISO-8859-1, also known as Latin-1". Is there a conflict here? I didn't know about XML-format on properties, that's nice to know, although XML is such a verbose syntax :/
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