lucy24 - 8:09 pm on Nov 14, 2012 (gmt 0)

All header-based forms have one drawback: If someone saves your page locally (yes, this might be done for legitimate reasons, not just by scrapers) the page will not contain any text encoding information of its own. So it may display incorrectly.

How much does a charset meta tag add to page loading time? Or, more exactly: does reading a header take less time than reading a meta tag?

Depending on content, your css and js may not even need to be utf-8 encoded. I've got a lurking suspicion that ascii reads faster-- but only if the browser knows ahead of time that it's ascii. (For comparison purposes, I've only got one stylesheet that contains non-ascii information. I expected to use an entity but it didn't work.*)


* Pseudo-class content. It displayed the literal entity instead of the intended non-ascii character. Oops.