lucy24 - 11:03 pm on Jun 6, 2011 (gmt 0)

File and Remember:

If you use entities for all non-ASCII characters, it does not matter what encoding you declare. The term "charset" is misleading (boring historical reason which I won't go into, mainly because I don't remember it). It has nothing to do with what characters the document is able to display; it only refers to the relationship between the raw HTML file and what the user sees. Any HTML file can display any character.

To make things more fun, there are three ways to do entities. First are the HTML 4 named entities: é and so on. Long long ago when I used Internet Exploder 5.1 (the last Mac version), it was only able to display characters that had a named entity. You didn't have to use the entity-- you could use numbers or the actual character-- but it had to have one. (And it couldn't read the "charset" declaration, so you had to change that manually. I still include a blurb about it in all e-texts, though by now it's probably superfluous.)

Then there are the decimal numerical entities. My fingers do not like typing the word "entitities". Like "banana", they do not know where to stop. é for that same é, for a savings of two bytes-- set against an even higher level of unreadability in the raw file. And finally the hexadecimal entities é Doesn't save any space unless you get into big numbers where powers of 16 use fewer digits than powers of 10, but useful if your character map is hexadecimal to start with.

Now back to the original post. Just out of curiosity, why did you want to change encodings? Personally I use UTF-8 by default, but then I use a lot of non-ASCII and especially non-Latin-1 characters ;)