Preambles : As already placed in this , in this other and several other answers , UTF-8 is a standard de facto and de jure . Governments, such as European and Brazilian, and democratic entities, such as W3C, strongly recommend the use of UTF-8. Portuguese speakers need both the accents and interoperability provided by UTF-8.
Why do not we, analysts and programmers, demand from our work environment that we adopt the UTF-8 standard?
Question : How can software and information technology companies require their customers and suppliers to exchange UTF-8 data?
What you are looking for with the question are recommendations of "good practices", technical, managerial and commercial : how to deal with people who do not know or do not value the problem? What practices are in use today in a digital supply chain?
Some example scenarios :
We require a vendor "all in UTF8", is it delicate to "kick your foot" by requiring UTF8?
We require a client "all in UTF8", can I request it again when it ignores the request, without even being justified?
We are integrating all company data (customer), and emphasizing that interoperability will only be simple and feasible if all subsystems are expressed in UTF8 ... Half that is not expressed, and the cost of converting and test everything again go there to the top ... What to do?
A colleague, a friend, is responsible for the infrastructure (among other things, he is the only one allowed to install and reconfigure PC and server software) ... In our department we have agreed that everything needs to be UTF -8. Each PC's operating system, each IDE (eg Eclipse), each compiler, every database ... All ensuring "UTF-8" or manually configuring as UTF-8. But the responsible colleague clearly made a limp, and we are far from achieving that. What to do?
How to take the first steps to change the culture of "leave that coding thing, impregnated in us and around us"
NOTES
Of course, one can not demand from those who can not generate UTF-8 outputs, but we know that 90% of the default default configuration of a nationalized or localized product can adopt UTF-8. What's more, when it comes to data interchange, that is, formats such as XML and HTML, fully open and fully standardized environment (eg IETF and W3C recommendations), we can kick out that 99% can be UTF-8. p>
The various nuances and contexts of the UTF-8 theme are discussed in this answer to a similar question .