which meta charset?

[Jessi]

After searching for hours for the answer, I feel like the newbiest of newbies.

My Web site is xhtml 1.0. I only have English content, so far. I might add some Spanish.

What character encoding should I specify with the meta charset tag so that people see my site properly? Is there just one correct choice, or more than one?

Does it depend on how my text editor saves files, and if so, how would I find out which character set it uses? (I use BBEdit Lite on Mac X)

Thank you from this befuddled hobbyist,

Jessi

[isitreal]

I might add some Spanish

I do a website that is fully bilingual, english and spanish, split into english and spanish versions, using this charset:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

And there are no display problems, and the spanish portion of the site is very highly ranked on google mexico for its categories.

I can't say that's the best way to do it, but it works fine.

[Jessi]

Thanks, isitreal, I'll probably do the same. I don't quite get the whole utf-8 thing, though I've read several articles about it. I have the impression that it may become the standard some day, in which case, it'll probably be easier to find out how to use it at that point. I'd rather wait until it's clear that all browsers will support it and that my text editor saves files in it.