What is Encoding Mean and is there a Best One

sort of a cross post I do not understand UTF-8 encoding?

[HappyMomAnna]

Sorry should say What "DOES" encoding mean.....

I am wanting to Add the Google Search feature to my website and have it also search my site.

In the instructions it says that I need to change the code offered by google to the encoding that I am using if it is NOT UTF-8.

I checked my pages code and see nothing about UTF-8 in it....? However if I go to a page and right click there seems to be a little prompt that allows me to switch to UTF-8 while I am looking at the page (if it actually switchs?)

My question is What is Encoding and would it be better to be UTF-8? If it is better to be UTF-8 is this a line of code I place in the HEAD or what? And do I need to do something to all my pages?

If it doesn't matter what kind of encoding I use what or where would I find the info to change on the google code so that I can use this on my site?

Thank You for ANY HELP?

[stapel]

To be honest, I'm not entirely clear on the "ins and outs" of coding. But, yes, this is something you handle with a line in the HEAD of your pages. In mine, I have the following:

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

It is my understanding that the different "charset" declarations tell the browsers how to handle the character codes they receive.

Have you ever viewed a page where some of the characters displayed as question marks? Or displayed as something funky that you knew couldn't have been what the author had had in mind? This is generally caused by your browser misinterpreting or not understanding what was sent to it. You declare a charset to specify to the browser which character-coding set to use.

I use the "iso-8859-1" set because it displays the "minus" sign that I find useful on my algebra web site. (A hyphen just doesn't cut it, and the designated "minus" signs in the "modern" character sets aren't dependably supported by the browsers my site's visitors are receiving.) Without that charset declaration, some of my visitors saw "?" everywhere I'd meant there to be a proper "minus" or "subtraction" sign. By inserting the "charset" designation into the HEAD of all my pages, even browsers that default to other character sets (such as UTF-8) display what I mean the viewer to see.

I hope that helps a bit.

Eliz.

A tutorial on character code issues [cs.tut.fi]
W3C: The HTTP charset parameter [w3.org]
UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux [cl.cam.ac.uk]
WDG: Using Character Encodings [htmlhelp.com]
The ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup [czyborra.com]

[HappyMomAnna]

Thank you for your answer I have been getting to the bottom of this all day!

I have found my encoding in my meta tags:

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

I believe that I had my meta tags generated at a site (I paid) and have been using these tags since...with changes for the page.

Anyway--I have found that the Google Search engine is not the only tool Google offers where this UTF-8 code is required... I was also interested in the Site Map generator they offer and there was UTF-8 again!

I wonder is this something as simple as my changing the coding to say UTF-8? Or do I need to do more then this? If I go in and change the meta tag I have and replace the **charset=iso-8859-1**? Not even sure what I would change it to? But if I just change this will it work or will it mess my pages up?