> I ended up writing our pages in UTF-8 which solved the problem and met our > needs. Yep. This is generally the best approach. > I was left wondering what benefit Shift-JIS brings that UTF-8 does not? On the web, nothing. Shift-JIS is a nasty legacy encoding that should die ASAP. Unfortunately, there are still some Japanese mail services (we noticed Yahoo! Mail in particular) that cannot display mail sent in UTF-8. If you have your web system send Unicode mails automatically, some Japanese readers will just get gibberish. Shift-JIS and ISO-2022 are more widely supported in mail, for now.
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