Sounds good to me. Do you want to add this on dev.xwiki.org in the dev practices? Do we have examples for 5? Velocity template files maybe (although I'd suggest allowing only ISO chars in them)? Thanks -Vincent On Nov 10, 2008, at 4:39 PM, Sergiu Dumitriu wrote: > 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? > > -- > Sergiu Dumitriu > http://purl.org/net/sergiu/