ISO-8859-1 vs UTF-8?

Question

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

Is Character-set related to geo

Answer 1

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. ;)