On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 9:42 PM, Brion Vibber <brion(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
It doesn't -- that's the default of your
browser. (Unless your browser
is Safari, in which case it defaults to a Sans Serif font.)
Thanks. That was the source of my confusion.
MediaWiki uses Unicode UTF-8 encoding for all
input/output, including
URL formatting. The UTF-8 bytes in the URLs are then encoded per spec
(that is, as URI-compatible IRIs).
In many cases you can still link to your wiki from outside using a
non-Unicode encoding... "incoming" URLs which are detected as not being
valid UTF-8 are assumed to be in a language-specific encoding (defined
in the language file; for Arabic this will be windows-1256).
Conversion is then applied to get the data into Unicode -- but this will
probably only work properly for non-Western encodings when PHP's iconv
extension is available.
Thanks Brion.
I'm trying hard to implement IRIs support for my wiki site, which is
still under development. The percent-espace part of a non-UTF8 encoded
URI is really really unfriendly. The browsers support for IRIs varies
considerable albeit all them (except IE6 which needs an add-on for
that) are claiming built-in IRIs/IDNs support (I don't care about IDNs
for now). The best being Opera which displays IRIs just perfectly (you
can check it on the Arabic Wikipedia). IE7 also has built-in IRIs
support but it doesn't work no matter what I've done. I have the right
settings in Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced: Send UTF-8 URLs,
but still it doesn't work!
Firefox support it by setting the value of
"network.standard-url.encode-utf8" in about:config to true (default is
false), but yet again it doesn't work!
WikiMedia URLs are not just paths to files or articles; actually one
can learn many things about MediaWiki's structure and architecure by
looking at a URL, and that's why I'm persistant in getting them to
work.
I've done all these tests on a latest version 1.11.1 MediaWiki
installed on a localhost dev server, and iconv is installed ane
enabled. I'm clueless as to what should I do.