Comments on: Clichés are hard

By: Dominic Mitchell

Dominic Mitchell — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 16:51:17 +0000

Mark Fowler: Very true. But the W3C does recommend NFC…

By: Mark Fowler

Mark Fowler — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 16:40:40 +0000

Of course, in Unicode, “é” has a character code under 255 if and only if you’re using NFC. Use NFD and everything suddenly looks a lot different…

By: Mot

Mot — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 12:05:11 +0000

Thanks for the article. Proper research done and describben. I love that style. For CSS charsets it pays to consider using the declaration inside the CSS-File as well with the @charset-rule:

@charset "<IANA defined charset name>";
@charset "UTF-8";

it belongs at the very beginning of the document. (more)

For the HTML a charset can be added as well into meta headers. This helps to read documents when they were saved and are not provided by the server any longer:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

does that job. But all this is only a very slight addition to your great article.

By: Dominic Mitchell

Dominic Mitchell — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 16:36:18 +0000

@steffen: Good point, but terribly anglocentric. Perhaps you would win the IOCCC “Best abuse of the rules.”

@codingvista: It depends on the server side language. Certainly Java and Perl allow you to use Unicode in identifiers, possibly Ruby too. I think PHP is the only severely Unicode crippled language at this point.

But in general, this post isn’t really about those specifics. It’s more about: “How do I get a proper answer to my web development problem.” And for that, you do need to go to the specs.

By: Steffen Tiedemann Christensen

Steffen Tiedemann Christensen — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 15:11:37 +0000

Nice article, but there’s a much aasier solution: http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/clich%C3%A9

By: codingvista

codingvista — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 14:04:30 +0000

Hey

I haven’t time to read the whole lot so you may have already mentioned this but if you reflect CSS id’s/class names in server side code, and there are good reasons why you’d do this, then using complex characters would be a nono.

Just my .5p

w://

By: Dan Eastwell

Dan Eastwell — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 09:06:20 +0000

Great article Dominic! Saves me the time of having to work it out for myself. There will almost certainly come a point where things aren’t working and I’ve ended up using a >255 Unicode character in my CSS. Again!