Ubuntu encodings

[Simos Xenitellis]

Στις 15-08-2006, ημέρα Τρι, και ώρα 12:54 +0200, ο/η Dieter Schicker
έγραψε:
> Hi,
> 
> > I agree with Joe. I see the same bad behaviour in kubuntu's firefox (I also 
> > use debian etch with latin1) when seeing some portuguese sites. It chooses 
> > UTF8 wrongly (instead of iso88591) very often.
> 
> What do you mean by "wrongly"? Isn't it far more often the case that
> webpages are encoded wrongly or webservers are not configured properly?
> I never had problems with Firefox except for pages that were not encoded
> properly.

Indeed.

There exist webpages that do not specify their encoding so it is left
down to the browser to choose which encoding to use. Firefox has some
support to guess the encoding that works rather well (in some cases, it
confuses Greek to Cyrillic). To see which encoding Firefox chooses when
webpages/webservers are silent, see
Edit/Preferences/Content(?)/Fonts & Colours/Advanced/Default encoding
Usually Firefox sets here the legacy encoding that is relevant to your
locale (a website that does not specify encoding is probably a legacy
website).

> > And explicitly disagreeing with you, not far away in time, iso88591 was the 
> > default encoding in linux. Ok, maybe quite some time, but I still see no 
> > reason why this should be changed _as a default_.
> 
> Can you give an argument why iso-8859-_1_ should be the default? Because
> English or Romance languages are in it? Why not choose Chinese encoding
> (gb18030 or iso2022cn) as  a default? Many more people speak Chinese
> than Western languages ... So your decision is kinda arbitrary.
> 
> And, by the way, the Ubuntu slogan is "Linux for Human Beings" and _not_
> "Linux for First World Human Beings" ...

UTF-8 is the way forward. There is quite some work with converting from
legacy encodings and specifically tools that can help in this
conversion. With UTF-8, all will eventually be happy.

Simos