unicode

it's all gone unicode, even the poems.

Over the last few weeks I've been gradually converting; my local copy of this site is now entirely unicode, and everything else is following suit. This is something I'm proud of. It also explains why I haven't uploaded the±wire 0.9.1 yet; hopefully, some time this week, when I can mark a couple of hours aside, I'll be uploading the whole lot.

UTF-8 has become my standard document type in BBEdit, TextPad, everywhere! I am now offended if I receive plain ASCII. it's like, are you American or something? that's right, unicode is all about the "international" issue, you know, the brotherhood of man and all that. Beyond that, in fact, it can even handle Klingon, you name it!

I had imagined this converting job would be a hassle, but it turned out to be quite the opposite, even solved a few long-running technical issues I'd been having. it's a great feeling knowing that you can represent any character on the planet in one text document, and that that document can be universally rendered and understood.

It was the "±" in the±wire that did it. If it hadn't been for that, I don't think I would have noticed this whole text encoding issue, like most folk, I would have carried on regardless, which is fine for most folk, but certainly not for anyone developing software, or web pages. I feel richer for the experience, certainly, and everything from corzblog to the±wire, to this very site has improved because of it.

Ahh, that's another thing in need of a repack and upload, corzblog; there have been a few wee improvements since I last put out the source, improves as I go along, probably because I use it every day myself. That new pop-up of symbols, for instance, pretty much grows as I need a particular symbol. Gotta find a smarter way to do the php transformations though, and don't talk to me about PHP's support for Unicode, there isn't any. (yeah I saw those two convert functions. pffff)

Webmasters, did you know that if you add the line

.htaccess or apache.conf addition:

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

you can have Apache add a nice content header to every document it serves? Well, you do now. don't know what a content header is? Here, I prepared one earlier..



Anyway, now I know exactly why I get emails from ?????? ?????? all about ????? ?????????? ??????????. Yeah sure, it's spam, but that's not the point; even spam should be properly encoded.

I feel a mission coming on.

for now..

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org