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The instructions for adding my site to the searches says:
Note: If your page is not encoded as UTF-8, you should change the value of both fields to match your page's encoding.
I have NO CLUE? is there something that I can add to my pages that makes them UTF-8 or what would I chaange the value of both fields to match my encoding? Frankly I do not understand what encoding I have used--if any?
And if I have some kind of encoding--is this UTF-8 better then whatever I do have....and should I change something on all my pages to fit this 'better' encoding?
?
Thanks to anyone who is able to help!
Anna
No really, UTF-8 is a type of character encoding... an issue most of us non-expert HTMLers don't ever bother to figure out. It's in your meta tags, i.e.:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
I've never seen the code of this Google stuff, but it sounds as if there are two areas in the code where it calls a character set... personally I'd say that since you evidently did not make a conscious decision to choose a certain encoding, it won't hurt you to just switch the meta tag in your page's <head> to UTF-8, a la the bit of code I just provided. Good luck. Perhaps someone will come along with a more detailed explanation of character encoding.
If you have no idea what it is all about, your page probably isn't UTF-8 encoded. When you, for all characters outside the ascii range 32 to 255, use entity encoding, e.g. write the euro character as €, you don't use UTF-8 but probably ISO-8859-1. In that case change the string to:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
For more info on UTF-8 see [en.wikipedia.org...]
Arjan