Re: [xwiki-devs] [vote] Encoding for filesystem resources

Hi devs, Until now, filesystem resources were not forced to a specific encoding (except ResourceBundle translation resources, which are forced by the spec to contain only ISO-8859-1 characters and unicode escapes). And the number of files not being ASCII was kept to 0, thus a policy wasn't needed. However, it is better to set a rule, in case third party developers need to place non-ascii characters in source files, such as JavaScript or CSS extensions and skin files. So, here are some proposed rules we should make public on our dev site, and follow ourselves. 1. All Java source files must contain only ASCII chars, unicode escapes inside strings when needed, and xml entities in javadocs. Since we don't use @author tags, this should not be a problem. 2. All translation files contain only ASCII chars and unicode escapes (stronger than the spec). 3. All wiki documents sources must be stored in UTF-8. 4. Other XML files should always specify their encoding in the <?xml header, and it should be as often as possible UTF-8. 5. All other textual resources must be stored in UTF-8, minimizing the use of non-ASCII chars. The changes are that: 1: This is the practice we were already using, but we didn't have a written rule on this. 2: This is the practice we were already using, but we didn't have a written rule on this, except in the "Contributing" page. 3: Wiki sources are currently in ISO-8859-1 because our default package ships with that encoding, and XML exports are usually done from the default package. This is not really a problem, since the XML reader can detect and use the encoding specified inside the document itself. 4: Not a strong requirement, but a suggestion only. Most of our XMLs are currently using ISO-8859-1, but since they only contain ASCII chars, it doesn't really make a difference. 5: There was no rule on this, and the resources were always read using the system encoding, which means that our package is not 100% portable now, unless we force people to set a specific JVM encoding. I'd like to force UTF-8 as the encoding for this kind of resources since it is hard to represent all the characters in 8bit encodings. WDYT?