Since DNN 3 will be a great step forward to localization, I would like to know how the encoding question is being adressed in this new version.

Until 2.1.2, I guess that most (western) europeans admins have been changing the default encoding (in the web.config) from utf-8 to iso-8859-1 - and I guess to iso-8859-x for other eastern europe languages.

Since ISO is intended to be universal, why not adopt this encoding for everybody ?

I understand that UTF-8 is kind of optimized for english, by coding the most usual characters with only 1 byte instead of 2 bytes for ISO characters.

But since the .net framework internal encoding is ISO, is UTF-8 really an advantage in terms of efficiency ? (I guess it requires some conversion at a level or another anyway).

In other terms, what would be the drawback for english portals using ISO instead of UTF - if any ?

Thanks for lights on this - maybe here, and if it is still time, in the coming localization documentation.

Benoit.

PS Speaking for european languages, but also for oriental and asian cultures who probably suffer the same problems - maybe worse.

It appears that when - as is the case now - all aspx, ascx files are encoded with ANSI then you'll have to use ISO and not UTF-8 encoding in the web.config in order to get the accented characters found in French, German etc. Using ISO encoding will on the other hand rule out Cyrillic, Greek and other non-latin characters so I still think the UTF-8 is the best. And simply encoding the ascx, aspx files with UTF-8 will secure that you can specify UTF-8 in the web.config and get it all right (I tested with Russian, French, Danish and English in the same login user control and it works fine).

//Niels