Ubuntu encodings

[Felipe Figueiredo]

On Tuesday 15 August 2006 07:54, Dieter Schicker wrote:
> 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.
>
> > 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? 

I thought it was clear I am not a natively English speaker/reader. In fact, if 
I only read English, I think it wouldn't matter which of these encodings I 
used, correct?

It seems to me that most webservers, and site makers use ISO, instead of UTF. 
Since I also get some problems (like the OP) with auto-detection, I think 
this "pressure to change the default" should be put aside, in favor of "human 
beings", don't you agree?

This could very well be a firefox bug, but I find it easier just to avoid it. 
Am I wrong just to want things to work out of the box? If ubuntu hadn't shove 

> 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.

Pure rhetorics. They (the chinese users) already have to make several 
essential changes in their environment so they can get their proper alphabet. 
I assume there are packages/distributions to make that easier, and I assume 
this is made by chinese (so that it's coherent with their needs).


> And, by the way, the Ubuntu slogan is "Linux for Human Beings" and _not_
> "Linux for First World Human Beings" ...

Now it's the time for the (very offtopic, btw) geography lecture. Brazil is a 
third world country. Over 50% of the population starve, while (approx) 90% of 
the wealth is concentrated on less than 10% of pop.

Can you then give an argument how does UTF-8 makes things easier for anyone? 
For latin speakers/readers it just seems to add some confusion in the pan. 
Ok, so Portuguese speakers may not be representative worldwide, but if you 
add spanish speakers, and some other languages latin based languages (which 
probably default to ISO encodings), you actually get most of the world's 
(non-chinese) population. Wow. I note the fact that there is no such thing as 
a "Chinese language", but many. Do all chinese speak/read mandarim or 
cantonese?

As a matter of fact, last time I checked, several major french news sites were 
encoded in iso-8859-1 (including Le Monde). Before you bash me again with the 
first world rhetorics, there are several african countrys in which French is 
spoken. So, if you add portuguese, spanish and french, how many more people 
you need to get a defult in your rhetorical argument? 

If you told me UTF-8 should be a default, because GOOGLE uses it, I would 
accept, though. ;-) Otherwise, I want some real arguments.

regards
FF