SNAPPS Quickr templates and international characters
Category None
Not that we have a vested interest
,
but someone recently reported that they had an issue with Swedish characters
in a few of the SNAPPS Quickr templates. Actually, there probably
were problems with some other templates, and other Domino applications
that use more advanced XHR, JSON and Dojo techniques.
We traced this particular problem to a server setting - not the code but a default setting on the Domino server document on a Quickr server. The Character Set section starts out like you see below - with different character sets for all kinds of international characters.
By simply changing the first field "Use UTF-8 for Output" to "Yes", it solved the problem with Swedish and other characters. According to Wikipedia:
It (UTF-8) is able to represent any character in the Unicode standard, yet the initial encoding of byte codes and character assignments for UTF-8 is backwards compatible with ASCII. For these reasons, it is steadily becoming the preferred encoding for e-mail, web pages, and other places where characters are stored or streamed.
So my question is, why isn't it on by default on a US English Domino server? With more web interactions being global in nature, why not support as many character sets as possible with the default configuration? I'd love to hear from some IBMers on this, as it's not my area of expertise.
Not that we have a vested interest
,
but someone recently reported that they had an issue with Swedish characters
in a few of the SNAPPS Quickr templates. Actually, there probably
were problems with some other templates, and other Domino applications
that use more advanced XHR, JSON and Dojo techniques.
We traced this particular problem to a server setting - not the code but a default setting on the Domino server document on a Quickr server. The Character Set section starts out like you see below - with different character sets for all kinds of international characters.
By simply changing the first field "Use UTF-8 for Output" to "Yes", it solved the problem with Swedish and other characters. According to Wikipedia:
It (UTF-8) is able to represent any character in the Unicode standard, yet the initial encoding of byte codes and character assignments for UTF-8 is backwards compatible with ASCII. For these reasons, it is steadily becoming the preferred encoding for e-mail, web pages, and other places where characters are stored or streamed.
So my question is, why isn't it on by default on a US English Domino server? With more web interactions being global in nature, why not support as many character sets as possible with the default configuration? I'd love to hear from some IBMers on this, as it's not my area of expertise.
Comments
Why not default to UTF-8? Because of the assumption that the non-ASCII characters American English servers would most likely have to deal with would be Western European characters, and the fact that UTF-8 requires two bytes for those characters, whereas iso8859-1 requires only one.
Posted by Richard Schwartz At 11:53:21 PM On 12/11/2007 | - Website - |