Why isn't osCommerce encoded in UTF-8

[djmonkey1 0]

In June 2004, the ISO/IEC working group responsible for maintaining eight-bit coded character sets disbanded and ceased all maintenance of ISO 8859, including ISO 8859-1, in order to concentrate on the Universal Character Set and Unicode. In computing applications, encodings that provide full UCS support (such as UTF-8 and UTF-16) are finding increasing favor over encodings based on ISO 8859-1.

 

So why is osCommerce 2.2 still coming "boxed" in ISO 8859-1? 3.0 uses UTF-8; so does this website.

[Jan Zonjee 59]

Wow, they ceased all maintenance of the iso-8859-1 character set? I truly shit my pants. What is to become of it?

[bkellum 31]

:lol:

[djmonkey1 0]

Hey, it's JanZ! What's up?

 

ISO 8859-1 is a dinosaur. It's like PHP 2.0. It's old. Obsolete.

 

Good luck cleaning up that mess in your pants!

[Jan Zonjee 59]

ISO 8859-1 is a dinosaur. It's like PHP 2.0. It's old. Obsolete.

So what? It works fine for most languages so what is the advantage? Personally, I never have needed it. What happens if your MySQL database is iso-8859-1 encoded?

 

I see more trouble than advantages and the forums are already full of people who have absolutely no clue whatsoever on most of what they are doing with osC. Do we need more problem areas?

[djmonkey1 0]

So what? It works fine for most languages so what is the advantage? Personally, I never have needed it. What happens if your MySQL database is iso-8859-1 encoded?

Change that to UTF-8 too! Then see how dirty your pants get!

 

I see more trouble than advantages and the forums are already full of people who have absolutely no clue whatsoever on most of what they are doing with osC. Do we need more problem areas?

 

I'm just asking....

 

You say there are more problems than advantages in switching over to UTF-8? That's true for established websites written in Cyrillic, but what I'm suggesting is that the whole project should be encoded in UTF-8 from the start. I agree that given how popular 2.2 is, now is a bit late to change something so fundamental that so few people are even aware of or have any reason to think about (especially if they can't figure out how to set configure.php!).

 

Whatever. Updating all this kind of stuff is what 3.0 is for, right?

[Jan Zonjee 59]

I'm just asking....

Well, I'm just wondering....

 

You say there are more problems than advantages in switching over to UTF-8?

No, no, I'm just suggesting the number of advantages might be smaller than the number of disadvantages. As said, I never worked with UTF-8 (but found PHP code ending with cryptic errors when UTF-8 spaces were in it) so I have no idea about the problems you might encounter.

 

I do know that Notepad does not work with UTF-8 (heck, it doesn't work properly with Unix style line feeds...) so there might be a problem area.

That's true for established websites written in Cyrillic, but what I'm suggesting is that the whole project should be encoded in UTF-8 from the start. I agree that given how popular 2.2 is, now is a bit late to change something so fundamental that so few people are even aware of or have any reason to think about (especially if they can't figure out how to set configure.php!).

I have no idea really about what it would take and what the consequences would be.

Whatever. Updating all this kind of stuff is what 3.0 is for, right?

Version 2 will be around for a long time....