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What charset should I use for my site and SMF?


webmaster1

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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.

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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?

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