[ic] UTF-8 Advantages/Disadvantages

[Rok Ruzic]

> What are the advantages of running with UTF-8 on an english language 
> site?

UTF-8 on an english language site gives you:

1. Correct printout of customer names/addresses if they contain
non-ascii characters.

2. Correct display of products in case you get product names with
non-ascii characters.

3. some formatting characters (in case you want to use them)

It's up to you to decide, whether you need any of those features or not.


>   7. Test system (no UTF-8): 5 seconds, Production system (UTF-8): 49
>      seconds

It would be great to know, where the major utf8 bottleneck was. Do you
plan to investigate further? It would be great to find out, if it was
the DB, some IC component, a specific IC tag perhaps.

UTF8 support in IC is rather clunky, we all know that, it would make
good sense for us to create utf-8 filters on all data input and output,
and not deal with utf-8 in IC itself at all.

If you investigate further, please let us know of your findings.

Regards,
Rox