raiguard wrote:I converted all my skins back to UTF-8 once CR variables became a thing. It makes the files smaller, and it plays nicer with GitHub (GitHub can’t compare code changes in UTF-16 LE files for some reason).
Is there some overarching reason why using UTF-8 is a bad idea?
Rainmeter can't read UTF-8 w/BOM. If you use UTF-8 w/o BOM and don't use any Unicode characters in it, it will be identical to ANSI and that is ok. However, as soon as you put a Unicode character in it, it will save as UTF-8 w/BOM and won't work, in addition, if you use characters from the Extended ASCII set, above decimal 127, those are locale / codepage specific, and you might not get the same resulting characters on someone else's computer in another country.
Using inline [\xxxx] character references in place of Unicode will allow you to stay with UTF-8 w/o BOM, as it will be seen as ANSI, but you are going to have to be careful, and it feels like a lot of effort to NEVER be able to just paste in a Unicode character, and always worry about foreign character sets.
UTF-8 in general is a very bad idea for Rainmeter skins. They should always be UFT-16 LE.
You are free to do as you wish of course, but using UTF-8 is not something I would allow as a general recommendation on the forums. The community is just too international to depend on the ASCII character set. What is commonly referred to as ANSI, which is really a very limited UTF-8 w/o BOM, is just so old-school that it's creepy. It's not the 1960's anymore, and America is not the only country with computers. Your terminal is not a line printer connected to a 300-baud modem.
As for GitHub, that is regrettable, but not a concern for 99% of our users. The issue is that GitHub is not git, it a website that acts as a front-end for git. Websites prefer UTF-8 w/BOM as it impacts bandwidth (not so much size, that is trivial) so it makes sense that they would want that.