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could someone enlighten me as to the pros and cons of these and which would be the best and safest. my pages are in us english and don't use any particular special symbols other than
copyright
trademark
degree
In general you will find that most questions have already been asked on WebmasterWorld. Use the site search facility (in the top menu bar, above) to save yourself some time. You can also use a search engine such as FAST to search these boards. Just use "webmasterworld + your_search_term" - may be quicker than the site search.
The following threads all provide info on your question:
doctype charset=confused. What does it all mean? [webmasterworld.com]
doctype declaration - how do I establish HTML version? [webmasterworld.com]
which content type/charset to use [webmasterworld.com]
<meta http ..... charset=us-ascii"> - is this the best charset to use? [webmasterworld.com]
No matter if you're using plain text with ot without "special characters" I recommend always using ISO-8859-1 since it is more widely supported than us-ascii. It also narrows the encoding down a little bit. Finally, since that's the encoding English falls under, it is the natural choice...
Why?
It's shorter than any of the others (less code) and has a wide range of support.
shorter
UTF-8 works fine for pure HTML4 pages. It also works fine on IE (because it doesn't care). But, once you move to XHTML and open the page in other browsers, certain characters might not always be displayed as intended. Opera 6 is the most troublesome...
However, switching to ISO-8859-1 (and that being the only change) has always solved the problem for me...
Most problems with character entities arise when Webmasters specify fonts with limited character sets.
The font "arial unicode MS" is a monster! This sucker has everything AND the kitchen sink! The file size weighs in at 23,566kb! So much for font-embedding! LOL!, The good news, this font is present on most Windows systems... the bad news is, this font is present on most WINDOWS systems.... Arial, though nowhere near as ambitious as its big brother, does have excellent character entity support. Verdana, a very trendy font, does not share this level of support.
The Geneva font, has decent character support for Mac systems, but again... not even in the same ball park compared to Arial Unicode.
This took me by surprise as about 90% of what I see and all of my html editors default to 8859-1.
Why would they say that?
I don't see the support or evidence of that.
The validator I use is good and it's well respected software I believe.
