[AD] This is a call for translators' preparation

[Grzegorz Adam Hankiewicz <gradha@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi.

I am using this list to communicate that shortly my plan is to switch
all the Allegro web pages to utf-8, which was the original setting anyway.
The current state is that the pages are written in iso-8859-1. However,
shortly we will have polish and korean pages translations, and no iso
charset can cover all the possible combinations.

While it will be few pages or places where utf-8 will really be required
due to the charsets overlapping, being the standard it is, and given that
having all web source in utf-8 will be much better than hacking and
overloading the script with custom pseudo-detection charsets to generate
always correctly the apropiate output, I think that the only question
about this change is wheter we use utf-8 or another unicode encoding.

But of course, this is my personal opinion. If you have any griefs with
this decision, I would like to hear them (again, if necessary :), since
it would be quite stupid to revert back to iso charsets after a few
days of having unicode.

As for browsers, Explorer (5.x I think) seems to support very well utf-8
pages, so windows users are covered (in the case you don't have the fonts
installed you will be prompted to download them, which was quite a nice
surprise). Mozilla seems to work out of the box without problem, as I can
view here locally the korean version I've been recently sent. Lynx and
links seem to support correctly whatever encoding you wish, as long as
you have the correct fonts installed (which I don't).

Frédéric told me Netscape 4.x seems to have problems with utf-8. I
personally feel tempted to say that's an old an unsupported browser, but
I guess it still has a big audience (somewhere...). I have not Opera,
maybe somebody could comment about this browser which seems to be quite
popular.

In order to test your browsers you can go try the following test pages:
http://alleg.sourceforge.net/index.kr.html. That will allow you to
navigate through several Korean pages, which are still not in cvs. They
are using euc-kr instead of utf-8, but that's just a matter of encodings,
the most important thing is that the page is readable. If yes, that
means that switching to utf-8 should not harm your browser and will
allow to see such characters mixed anywhere with other languages.

BTW, one possible place where Korean characters would show always is
every page's header: at the moment the flags' descriptions are in the
language of the page, but this is wrong; the spanish flag should read
Español in all pages, the german one should read Deutch everywhere,
etc, just like the language locales in Allegro's setup program.

The idea is that all this utf-8 change will happen this weekend or the
next one. Translators should not worry now about having unicode aware
editors, if the change is done, I will post some links to free editors
supporting utf-8 at the alleg-www-commits mailing list.

PD: I am using the conductors list because I want to hear the opinion of
other Allegro developers, and cc it to alleg-www-commits in case
somebody there is not subscribed to AD, which is not a requirement.

-- 
 Grzegorz Adam Hankiewicz   gradha@xxxxxxxxxx   http://gradha.infierno.org