utf-8 by default ?

[vincent-peugnet]

Should the apache server be set by default to utf8 ?

[n-peugnet]

Advantages :

• No need to specify the meta charset in HTML files
• Almost every editors (if not all) now encodes plain text files in UTF-8 by default
• It is still possible to override it using .htaccess.

Downsides:

• This will break files encoded in the old default iso-8859-1
• It is not overridable in the HTML body

References

• https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-html-encoding-declarations
• https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/en/mod/core.html#adddefaultcharset
• https://stackoverflow.com/a/10926894/7837581

Decision

I think it is worth it, as no files are encoded in iso-8859-1 these days. And it is still possible to override it in a .htaccess (though not very user friendly).