Which charset to use?

[The Plankmeister]

In the <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=??????? ?"> tag, what is the best charset to use? I tend to use
UTF-8, for no reason other than it sounds much cooler than iso-8859-1 etc
etc... Are there any guidelines for this sort of thing?

P.

[Andreas Prilop]

"The Plankmeister" <pl************ ******@hotmail. com> wrote:

In the <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=??????? ?"> tag, what is the best charset to use? I tend to use
UTF-8, for no reason other than it sounds much cooler than iso-8859-1 etc
etc... Are there any guidelines for this sort of thing?

We had this discussion just a few days ago:
news:o6******** *************** *********@4ax.c om
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=375726c4206f6e49
Maybe you read this first?

[The Plankmeister]

So basically, it's dependant on the situation, and it's down to a two horse
race between UTF-8 and iso-8859-1?
From what I can gather, iso-8859-1 is the best all rounder because it
intrinsically has certain characters, whereas to obtain the same characters
in UTF-8, you need to use entity codes?

I think I'll make the switch to iso-8859-1 and see how it goes...

Thanks for the link :)

P.
"Andreas Prilop" <nh******@rrz n-user.uni-hannover.de> wrote in message
news:0909200321 57072296%nh**** **@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de...

"The Plankmeister" <pl************ ******@hotmail. com> wrote:

In the <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=??????? ?"> tag, what is the best charset to use? I tend to use
UTF-8, for no reason other than it sounds much cooler than iso-8859-1 etc etc... Are there any guidelines for this sort of thing?

We had this discussion just a few days ago:
news:o6******** *************** *********@4ax.c om
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=375726c4206f6e49
Maybe you read this first?

[Mark Parnell]

The Plankmeister wrote:

In the <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=??????? ?"> tag

You server should be sending that information, rather than using a meta
hack.

--

Mark Parnell
http://www.clarkecomputers.com.au

[Owen Jacobson]

The Plankmeister wrote:

In the <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=??????? ?"> tag, what is the best charset to use?

This should be in the Content-Type: header, not in the document itself.
Aside from that, you should use the one that best matches the document.

[Daniel R. Tobias]

The Plankmeister wrote:

In the <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=??????? ?"> tag, what is the best charset to use? I tend to use
UTF-8, for no reason other than it sounds much cooler than iso-8859-1 etc
etc... Are there any guidelines for this sort of thing?

The above-noted "meta" tag is merely a cheap plastic substitute for
sending a proper charset attribute in the actual server-supplied HTTP
headers.

You should use a charset attribute that actually reflects the encoding
of the data you're sending, not just one that "sounds cool".

Some info on character sets/encodings:
http://webtips.dan.info/char.html
http://mailformat.dan.info/body/charsets.html

--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/

[Stan Brown]

In article <3f************ ***********@dre ad14.news.tele. dk> in
comp.infosystem s.www.authoring.html, The Plankmeister
<pl************ ******@hotmail. com> wrote:

So basically, it's dependant on the situation, and it's down to a two horse
race between UTF-8 and iso-8859-1?
From what I can gather, iso-8859-1 is the best all rounder because it
intrinsicall y has certain characters, whereas to obtain the same characters
in UTF-8, you need to use entity codes?

I think I'll make the switch to iso-8859-1 and see how it goes...

Please don't post upside down.

Putting the charset in a <meta> tag in the document is a second-
choice technique. Far better that it should be provided a one of the
HTTP headers, which the browser sees before it begins parsing the
document.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
2.1 changes: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/changes.html
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

[The Plankmeister]

So I guess it's not possible to modify the charset then? Unless you change
the httpd.conf file (or whatever http server you happen to be running's
config files) In which case, if you have absolutely no control over the
charset the server is using, I guess there's no point in worrying about it?

P.

"Owen Jacobson" <oj************ **@mx-deus.net> wrote in message
news:H2******** ***********@new s20.bellglobal. com...

The Plankmeister wrote:

In the <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=??????? ?"> tag, what is the best charset to use?

This should be in the Content-Type: header, not in the document itself.
Aside from that, you should use the one that best matches the document.

[Sean Jorden]

"The Plankmeister" <pl************ ******@hotmail. com> wrote in
news:3f******** *************** @dread16.news.t ele.dk:

So I guess it's not possible to modify the charset then? Unless you
change the httpd.conf file (or whatever http server you happen to be
running's config files) In which case, if you have absolutely no
control over the charset the server is using, I guess there's no point
in worrying about it?

going by my knowledge of IIS, hope it applies/provides insight to
others....

The web server itself does not know what a charset is, it merely outputs
bytes.

If you want to stream HTML files in a certain charset, you have to save in
that charset (ie pre-convert your page to another character set). Eg, if
you want to serve a page in Big5, you have to create a file that looks
something like this:

活動�划

which is raw UTF8. Multi-byte charsets like UTF8 represent a single
character with a series of 1 or more bytes.

Sorry, I don't know how to change the headers on individual files in Apache
to modify the Content-Type.. but it would be like

Content-Type: text/html charset="UTF8"

[Mad Bad Rabbit]

"The Plankmeister" <pl************ ******@hotmail. com> wrote:

So I guess it's not possible to modify the charset then? Unless you
change the httpd.conf file (or whatever http server you happen to be
running's config files) In which case, if you have absolutely no
control over the charset the server is using, I guess there's no point
in worrying about it?
If it's a Apache server, you should be able to create a .htaccess
file in the same directory as your web pages and use it to specify
a custom Content-Type and charset.

http://apache-server.com/tutorials/A...-htaccess.html

If it's an IIS server, and it supports ASP pages, you could use the
command SetContentType( "text/html; charset=whateve r") in your page.

;K