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[Change] I hope SMF all developer and other language provide change to UTF8 defa

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AzaToth:

--- Quote from: Elmacik on November 03, 2005, 01:12:18 PM ---AzaToth, I didnt object its being optimal. I know it ;)
I just said, its not new

--- End quote ---
hehe, everything is relative, in relation to ASCII it's new.

CrayZ:
How is possible... since I changed my server i see some strange characters  :-X  ???

MrPhil:
Yes, SMF should switch to UTF-8 only. The advantages are that no more confusion with missing English-UTF8 language pack or incompletely switched-over database definitions when changing over to UTF-8 after starting out in ISO-8859-1. Maintenance and distribution will be simplified with only UTF-8 languages offered (and "utf8" can be dropped from the file names). All forums will be able to handle non-ASCII and non-Western characters entered by users. The downside is that language files currently in ISO-8859-n will become a bit larger in UTF-8, but that shouldn't be a serious impact, and current users will have to convert over whether they like it or not. SMF will also need to provide an optional filter to (at the forum admin's discretion) force only ASCII or only Latin-1 characters for user names and posts. Conversion to UTF-8 only won't be painless (witness all the problems people have now with trying to convert ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8), but in the long run SMF will be better off that way. Other PHP applications, such as Drupal and osCommerce, are going (or have already gone) this way.

Are there any hosts (deserving of the name) who cannot support UTF-8 (e.g., not offering "wide" character functions)? There are apparently some servers that override page charset selections and force Latin-1 for all pages. Is it worth keeping SMF in the Stone Age for the benefit of users on such hosts?

Since this is a fairly major change for SMF, I would suggest deferring it to 2.1 (and 1.2, if there is ever going to be such a stream). On the other hand, 2.0 might be as good as time as any, if its final release isn't just around the corner.

P.S. If it isn't already done so, theme and mod code needs to be checked for non-ASCII hardcoded characters before SMF endorses it by putting it in the download area of this site. Code files (as opposed to language files) should always use HTML entities for non-ASCII characters, but many authors seem to overlook this.

Antechinus:
I agree with this and it has been talked about. Makes a lot of sense IMO. Can't really do it for 2.0 at this stage but sounds good for versions after that.

live627:
Wonderful! Is it tracked in Mantis so no one forgets it?

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