Re: [tlug] OT-Japanese in PHP

[David E <dave@???>]

From: Evan Monroig <evan.ubuntu@example.com> on Date: Sat, 21 May 2005 15:30:00 +0900

> On 5/21/05, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@example.com> wrote:
> > I find it incredible that in mid-2005 this capability is "hopefully"
> > in the "near" future for *clever* browsers, and that professional web
> > admins are deliberately setting page charsets to Shift JIS.
> 
> You're quite right about this :). I found a book about CSS/HTML in
> japanese that was written in 2004, and inside it was advised not to
> use UTF-8 because some characters don't display well........ The
> generally accepted idea is that since Shift_JIS was created by
> Japanese people for Japanese people, then it handles the Japanese
> language better than UTF-8, which is not true (^_^)

I've heard the "UTF-8" messes up some characters objection from
Japanese developers several times, though I've been able to get an
actual example of it. Urban myth, perhaps? 

Anyway, the reason I suggested setting the output encoding in php.ini
to SJIS, for a begginner is that it's likely to be the easiest for him
to get started. Some keitai for example, only handle Japanese in SJIS
(unless that's been fixed over the last couple of years). Then there's
also the fact that if you're working with a web designer, trying to
get them to do their HTML in anything but Shift_JIS is almost always
waaay more trouble than making your scripts deal with SJIS output.

Dave