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(2020) See manifesto by UTF-8, and all the elements of discussion that still had around the subject by ~2015, at /a/28404/4186
From an international point of view and good practice, UTF-8 is the default de jure (W3C, IETF, etc.) since the early 2000s, and in fact since 2008 as shown by "turn chart":
(keeping down for historical record issues)
Preambles: as already placed in this, in this other and several other answers, UTF-8 is a standard in fact and de jure. Governments, such as European and Brazilian, and democratic entities, such as the W3C, strongly recommend the use of UTF-8. Portuguese speakers need both the accents and interoperability provided by UTF-8.
Why we, analysts and programmers, cannot demand from our desktop, that we adopt the UTF-8 standard?
Question: how software and computer companies could require their customers and suppliers to exchange data in UTF-8?
What you seek with the question is recommendations for "good practices", techniques, managerial and commercial: how to deal with people who do not know or who do not give the same value to the problem? What practices are in use today in a digital supply chain?
Some sample scenarios:
We order from a supplier "all in UTF8", it is delicate little "stomp" requiring UTF8?
We order from a client "all in UTF8", I can ask again when he ignores the request, without even being justified?
We are integrating all company data (customer), and emphasizing that interoperability will only be simple and viable if all subsystems express themselves in UTF8... Then half doesn’t express, and the cost of converting and testing everything again goes up... What to do?
A colleague, friend, is responsible for the infrastructure (among other things it is the only one with permission to install and reconfigure the software of the Pcs and the server)... In our department we agreed that everything needs to be UTF-8. Operating system of each PC, each IDE (e.g. Eclipse), each compiler, each database... All ensuring "DEFAULT UTF-8" or manually configuring as UTF-8. But the responsible colleague clearly made soft body, and we are far from achieving it. What to do?
How to take the first steps to change the culture of "let go of this coding thing", impregnated in us and around us?
NOTES
Of course, you cannot ask from those who cannot generate UTF-8 outputs, but we know that 90% of configuration cases default of a national product, nationalized or "localized", may adopt UTF-8. Moreover, when it comes to data exchange, that is, formats such as XML and HTML, fully open and under totally standardized environment (e.g. IETF and W3C recommendations), we can guess that 99% can be UTF-8.
The various elements and contexts of the UTF-8 theme are discussed in this answer to a similar question.
Interesting, but it seems out of date.
– ramaral
The title itself is already off-topic: "What is your opinion?". Check out Good subjective, Bad subjective.
– brasofilo
@brasofilo, correct, and I can edit the question as the "put on hold" suggests... But what to edit? I initially titled "How to ensure that settings, data exchanges, etc. respect UTF-8?" but I found the present title more direct. Will change the title becomes clear the goal: tips on how the programmer can demand from customers and suppliers respect the UTF8 standard.
– Peter Krauss
I know it’s out of date... but I’d like to see the answers.
– OnoSendai
The discussion is very interesting, but I don’t know if it works as a question. When I first read it under the old title, it looked more like an article/manifesto than a question. Perhaps a more objective formulation would be "why should we use UTF-8 instead of other encodings?" And the answers would serve as justification that programmers could use with customers, suppliers and even bosses (which often also cause problems). But the question is written as almost a "call to arms", a summons for us to revolt and no longer accept to use other encodings [cont.]
– bfavaretto
I don’t think there’s an objective solution to this problem other than awareness. UTF-8 is a standard, and every standard takes a while to "catch" definitely. Browsers and text editors themselves took a while to adopt UTF-8 as the standard. Not to mention PHP, which by default doesn’t use UTF-8, which gets in the way a lot. Anyway, just by the size of my comments you can see that it is a discussion that gives a lot of cloth to the sleeve. But is it suitable for the site? How about we discuss this at the finish line? Someone might open the debate there?
– bfavaretto
Another attempt: I turned the question into an answer. It was a solution to not lose the text (ready is saved)... Now I can ask for all: PLEASE EDIT (deleting parts) THE TEXT OF THE QUESTION AT WILL. I think that good ideas are already appearing here in the comments, just put into practice... and I alone am not aware: let’s treat as a Wiki, in Wikipedia always reach a "consensus text".
– Peter Krauss