What charset should I use for my site and SMF?

[webmaster1]

My site/forum will be in English only.

 

In my research, I've encountered UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1.

 

I can't seem to find a straight answer as to which one is better practice to use. I already know it depends on my content. It's just a regular site with an SMF forum so I can't think of anything to discern between the two.

[webmaster1]

Am I right to assume that it's simply a matter of the languages my site will be using, in which case UTF-8 is not required since my site will only be in English?

[thehippy]

ISO-8859-1 has a few advantages over UTF-8

• Its been a standard since the 80s and in use just as long
  
• Its easier to process (single byte encoding vs UTF's multi-byte encoding), thus faster to compare and store
  
• MySQL is far more optimized for ISO-8859-1 over UTF-8, this is getting better though
  

UTF-8 has advantages of its own.

• Whether your site is English based or not unless you have some added input filtering for non-ISO-8859-1 characters, they will show up and be improperly rendered, hitting your page(s) with a fugly stick.
  
• UTF-8 has the Latin alphabet plus the variations of the latin alphabet.  ISO-8859-1 is an incomplete set of the alphabet we use.  An example, the Canadian English alphabet is not completely covered because of its connection with French.  Formal/archaic Latin isn't completely covered either, which tends to show up in academic papers.
  
• If you decide in the future to add multilingual support, do you want to manage multiple character sets or just one?
  

[webmaster1]

Cheers for that. Based on your explanation and my needs, I'll opt for ISO.