[Mapbender-dev] Discussion: Character sets (client encoding)

[Arnulf Christl]

Christoph Baudson wrote:
> Arnulf Christl schrieb:
>> Christoph Baudson wrote:
>>> This is a proposal to serve UTF-8 encoded HTML pages only. In my 
>>> opinion there is no need to serve ISO-8859-1 pages.
>>>
>>> All character set conversions (when interacting with a database) 
>>> could be done in PHP. So the architecture would change from
>>>
>>> client: ISO/UTF8
>>> server: UTF8
>>> database: ISO/UTF8
>>>
>>> to
>>>
>>> client: ISO/UTF8
>>> server: UTF8
>>> database: ISO/UTF8
>>>
>>> This will simplify things a lot and would make Mapbender less 
>>> error-prone. If anyone has any reason why we should still serve ISO 
>>> pages, please step up. I have no idea why we should.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Christoph
>>
>> You confuse me, I cannot see the difference?
> 
> neither do I.
> 
> Here's what I meant
> 
> client: UTF8
> server: UTF8
> database: ISO/UTF8
> 
> Christoph
> 
> nr: copy and paste for beginners

I am just wondering - what is the reason that we need an ISO database dump at all? Why do we have it?

Obviously all who currently have an ISO database would need to convert to UTF8 and this is painful but if we can implement a good migration path this should be manageable. 

Unfortunately the Mapbender architecture is way more complex than just client, server and database. What happens to WMS that serve ISO encoded FeatureInfo results through the Mapbender tunnel. Or if you have one ISO and one UTF8 in the tunnel? WFS with GML that contains ISO encoded text. The full set of encoding trouble is a quite a stack indeed. 

If it is just the three mentioned layers I am all in favor.

+1

Regards, 
Arnulf.