Edward H. Trager <ehtrager at umich dot edu> wrote: > Given the maturity of support for Unicode in the various relevant > technologies(web servers, web browsers, XML, Javascript, Java, etc...) > and the global nature of the marketplace, it seems to me that it is > high time that web servers default to serving UTF-8 instead of > ISO-8859-1. The W3C should really stipulate UTF-8 as the default. > > In the case of Apache, it is trivial to change the configuration file > to UTF-8 instead of ISO-8859-1 (I even remember that it's around line > 780 something in the default configuration file distributed with > Apache version 2.x), but I wish it was the DEFAULT. In the case of > IIS (the server used for serving the form which was highlighted as > having the problem at the beginning of this thread), I would assume > that it would also not be difficult to set the configuration file, but > I don't have first-hand knowledge about how to do that. In any case, > UTF-8 should be the default for IIS and all the other servers out > there.
On Apache servers, if you don't have control of the server, you can overcome this problem by adding a file called .htaccess to each directory containing HTML pages. The file must contain the following line: AddType "text/html; charset=UTF-8" html My Web pages were temporarily broken a few months ago when Adelphia "upgraded" to a new version of Apache whose config files specified the ISO 8859-1 default. Previously the UTF-8 declarations on my pages were sufficient to get the pages served correctly, but now everything is served as ISO 8859-1 (regardless of encoding declaration) unless an .htaccess file is configured as shown above. Defaulting to ISO 8859-1 like this, when the world is moving to Unicode, is a major step backward in my opinion. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
