[OSRAIDS-developers] Re: Question

[<osr...@li...>]

Hi Andrew,
maybe it is because of my unperfect english, but I don't understand where is 
the problem. ISO-8859-X is a standard and Unicode is also a standard.

ISO-8859-X use 8-bit encoding and therefore it needs special charset tables 
for groups of languages (ISO-8859-1 is for Western Languages like English, 
German, Spain etc., ISO-8859-2 is for Eastern Europe languages like Czech, 
Slovak, Polish,), and there are other charsets for next language groups 
(Cyrillic, Hebrew, and many others). 

Unicode (www.unicode.org) is a 16-bit (or 32-bit) encoding which includes the 
most of the languages and character sets and it is based on ISO-8859 
charsets, which are grouped into one big charset.

ISO 10646 (compatible with Unicode 4.0) is a 32-bit encoding, which includes 
all the charsets on the world, it is the most complex charset.

You can read the relations between Unicode and ISO 10646 here:
http://www.unicode.org/faq/unicode_iso.html
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Windows-1250 is a Microsoft's non-standard modification of ISO-8859-2 used in 
some European countries. Unfortunately it is very expanded (because of M$'s 
monopoly) and many people consider it for standard. I don't recommend to use 
Windows-1250.
-----------
You can use ISO-8859-X or Unicode, both of them are standard and are well 
supported by browsers. Unicode has an advantage of 16-bit encoding, you can 
use more charsets (Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Cyrillic, Hebrew, 
Chinese...) together in single webpage. I am not sure if it is necessatry, 
but theoretically you have this possibility.

Robert

On Thursday 18 November 2004 12:27, Andrew Latham wrote:
> Robert and others....
>
> I have found many mentions of issues with Slovak on webdevelopment
> many of them revert to the UTF-8 (by the way my new setup will allow
> you to revert also!) while the rest are using the windows-1250 char
> set. I will allow the manual configuration of language sets so that
> UTF can be used but as I am finding most languages are working well
> with the ISO system.  It is the best of both worlds, I get to stick to
> the standards and use the ISO 8859-X for the languages and if a user
> wants they can select the UTF-8 for thier system. I am working on the
> idea of a central I18N server for the lang sets so that translators
> can update a central system and users can download the updated
> language set instead of a new version everytime. (for work I still use
> osraids v1.1 because it does most every thing I need.)

-- 
Robert Zelnik
e-mail: rz...@vs...