Published in Fiftyfoureleven on Tuesday, June 29th, 2004
A few changes made and our blog now has utf-8 character encoding.
We'd been wanting too for awhile, and were finally inclined to make the swith to utf-8 by Anne Van Kesteren's Quick guide to UTF-8.
There were a few glitches, and some time was lost due to an entity encoding bug in Opera (which, upon examining the comments at that link, I knew about - how soon we forget).
The why's and what's of utf-8 can be found here, in the links contained therein, and in Anne's post and the links he provides.
While doing all of this, I learned that viewing source in Opera, which by default launches in Wordpad (windows), words like Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn get munged because Wordpad apparently doesn't like utf-8... I'll need to change Opera's default viewer, or perhaps I should just stick with Firefox, which wouldn't have caused me to lose time due to the aforementioned bug :-/
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Comments and Feedback
Putting it to the test. Stolen from the source code on Anne's site and his post about Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn. See how this maxes out my use of background images. Perhaps time to get some sliding door mechanisms built into these...
You make me sick Mike - I still have got a UTF-8 working properly! Nice work.
Ha! I didn't know your last name so I was all "who'se that?" Darkblue out from under cover ;-]
Thanks, by the way. It did take a few tries. I made one attempt a few weeks ago, feebly changing the meta and header, but it turns out that that Opera bug mentioned above was holding me back, along with some little things in my commenting system had to be tweaked to make it all work fine.
Quoting myself... :-). And now, I could be a very bad boy and use IE mac to input this. It would be all screwed up due to a naughty, naughty bug in that browser that prevents correct input of East Asian text when the charset is UTF-8.
Indeed. I thought long and hard after reading someone's (I think it was Scrivs) dismissal of users who post under pseudonyms and have decided to reduce my usage of "DarkBlue" when commenting.
Ouch! I must have been tired when I wrote that. What I meant to write was, "I still haven't got UTF-8 working properly." I suspect that you understood anyway.
I wish more and more sites would move to Unicode. I've always hated the whole character encoding mess.