BLOB over varchar？

Question

I am developing a blog, where my client wants to use lot of images, for(articles, titles, advertisement, etc.). he hardly wants any text there, as the blog he wants it to be developed in arabic and he is not happy with any of the supporting font by web browser, nor he wants to adopt the EOT, he will be updating the blog daily (like just uploading the pictures),

what data type do you think i should be using for it? BLOB or VARCHAR ?

PS: i am using MySQL..

Check out the following site which uses the same concept as of my clients, although they are rivals, they have used images for links, news or advertisements and still the site is not that heavy..

http://www.sahilonline.net/

Answer 1

Update: I misunderstood that you want to store the text as images. The recommendations below are for storing native text, not image data. I have to agree with @Col that this is a very bad idea - performance-wise, in regards to search engine visibility (no indexing will take place), accessibility for people with visual or other impairments, different screen resolutions, mobile devices... Although I can understand that the selection of browser-available fonts does arabic characters even less justice than they do ours, I would try and get the client away from this idea.

For new projects, definitely VARCHAR or TEXT / LONGTEXT with a UTF-8 character set.

The main reason being that only (VAR)CHAR and TEXT can do fulltext search

How you store your data in the data base has nothing to do with arabic font support or encoding issues. A UTF-8 table can store arabic text without problems.

For some very thorough basic reading on encoding issues, there's Joel Spolsky's famous Unicode article.

mySQL 5 String type overview