ISO-8859-1 vs UTF-8?

Question

What should be used and when? Or is it always better to use UTF-8? Or ISO-8859-1 still has importance in specific conditions?

Is the haracter set related to geographic region?

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Is there a benefit to using the code @charset "utf-8";?

Or like this <link type="text/css; charset=utf-8" rel="stylesheet" href=".." />

at the top of the CSS file?

I found for this

If Dreamweaver adds the tag when you add embedded style to the document, that is a bug in Dreamweaver. From the W3C FAQ:

"For style declarations embedded in a document, @charset rules are not needed and must not be used."

The charset specification is a part of CSS since version 2.0 (may 1998), so if you have a charset specification in a CSS file and Safari can't handle it, that's a bug in Safari.

And add accept-charset in the form:

<form action="/action" method="post" accept-charset="utf-8"> 

And what should be used if I use the XHTML doctype?

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 

or

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

Answer 1

Unicode is taking over and has already surpassed all others. I suggest you hop on the train right now.

Note that there are several flavors of unicode. Joel Spolsky gives an overview.

(Graph current as of Feb. 2012, see comment below for more exact values.)

Answer 2

UTF-8 is supported everywhere on the web. Only in specific applications is it not. You should always use UTF-8 if you can.

The downside is that for languages such as Chinese, UTF-8 takes more space than, say, UTF-16. But if you don't plan on going Chinese, or even if you do go Chinese then UTF-8 is fine.

The only cons against using UTF-8 is that it takes more space compared to various encodings, but compared to western languages it takes almost no extra space at all, except for very special characters, and those extra bytes you can live with. We are in 2009 after all. ;)