Re: Best encoding for a Japanese web site to deliver?

From: Maciej Katafiasz (mnews2_at_wp.pl)
Date: 02/03/05 

Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2005 23:53:22 +0100

On day Thu, 03 Feb 2005 14:14:38 -0800 looked the Lord upon his prophet,
and the prophet was numbered among those called bobdc. And thus spake the
prophet:

> I'm sure there is plenty of discussion of this issue in Japanese; can
> anyone suggest recent good resources in English on the issue of which
> encoding a web server that delivers Japanese content should send to
> browsers?
>
> I get the impression that Shift JIS is still the most popular, but that
> Unicode is gaining. Is there any down side to shipping Unicode, other
> than problems with older browsers? How old do they have to be for
> Unicode to be a problem?

Old enough to make lack of unicode support least of your worries when
supporting them...

> Does UTF-16 make more sense than UTF-8, or vice versa?

*Definitely* UTF-8. UTF-16 is pretty much broken standard (it doesn't
properly define endiannes, relying instead on BOM hack, which has
wonderful property of having almost every flaw UTF-8 managed to avoid),
it's unused, unsupported (it's hard to find editors that can save to
UTF-16), and really the only time you'd want to use UTF-16 is when you
absolutely, positively need to feed some client *requiring* UCS-2 with
some characters from UCS-4 range. I don't think it's physically possible
for it to happen with currently defined unicode plane, and even if,
browsers don't need to be fed UCS-2.

> How about EUC-JP, which I see coming from goo.ne.jp, or ISO-2022-JP,
> which nttdocomo.co.jp sends to browsers?

I don't know about common japanese practice and rationale for it, I admit,
but I'd say just go with Unicode and be done with it forever. It's really
hard to find browser that can't grok UTF-8 nowadays, and Unicode is the
future, unlike all the broken, complicated (ISO-2022) standards of the
past.

Cheers,
Maciej 

-- 
"Tautologizm to coś tautologicznego"
     Mathrick <mnews2@wp.pl>
      http://mathrick.org

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