Re: DEC multilingual code page, ISO 8859-1, etc.

From: Erik van der Poel (erik@netscape.com)
Date: Tue Mar 28 2000 - 13:52:44 EST


Chris Pratley wrote:
>
> (in some countries that do not use ASCII characters, it
> would be a complete cut-off: the entire mail would be unreadable, not just
> the punctuation).

I'm just curious, but do you have any examples of such countries?

> Not many people know that IE5 and Office2000 send URLs in UTF-8 by
> default.

I don't know about Office2000 and MacIE5, but I believe WinIE5 only
sends the part *before* the question mark '?' in UTF-8 by default (for
URLs that contain a query part). The last part (form submission) is sent
in whatever encoding was chosen for that (usually, the same charset as
the form itself).

> We got significant complaints in Korea and Taiwan
> where there were apparently a significant number of ISPs supporting local
> characters in URLs by assuming the local encoding (KSC-5601or Big5) so we
> had to turn UTF-8 off by default there, but in most other areas it went
> over alright.

I find it quite interesting that you only had to turn it off for Korea
and Taiwan. I wouldn't have been surprised if you had to turn it off for
a bunch of other countries, such as Japan, etc. Thanks for doing the
trailblazing!

Erik



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