Re: Fwd: [xml-dev] Quiz: How do you put a Euro sign in your dataif your

[Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org>]

On Fri, 2013-03-01 at 10:55 -0300, Timothy W. Cook wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 9:49 AM, Michael Sokolov
> <msokolov@safaribooksonline.com> wrote:
> 
> > The advice I always give is: use (and demand) UTF-8 everywhere and anywhere
> > that you can.  Don't use named entities ever (actually this has nothing to
> > do with character sets, but it's still my position :)).
> 
> I tend to agree with this, Michael.
> 
> My questions is; Is there a use case or any good reason to use
> anything but UTF-8?
If you're in a non-UTF-8 environment then using the native encoding
locally can let you use other tools - e.g. text editors - on your data.

For Japanese or Chinese or Korean text, for example, UTF-16 is more
common, because it's more compact. On an IBM mainframe you might prefer
to work with one of the EBCDIC derivatives.

As for named entities, there are circumstances where they are a very
good fit - e.g. &productname; in a manual - although it's generally wise
to expand them before shipping the XML to an external organization.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
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