Forum Moderators: open
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
For html validation: very important... see w3.org #faq-charset [validator.w3.org]
ETA:
Note: the w3c recommends UTF-8
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
[edited by: encyclo at 11:14 am (utc) on Jan. 19, 2009]
[edit reason] fixed link [/edit]
[w3.org...]
There is quite a bit of reading in regards to this attribute in that section.
What's the difference between these two, if any of significance?
Google Source = <meta http-equiv=content-type content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
Others Source = <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
[edited by: encyclo at 2:18 am (utc) on Dec. 11, 2008]
[edit reason] no specifics please [/edit]
It is not the meta element in itself that is important, what is important is that you declare the actual charset used for the page's content, with via a HTTP header or via a meta charset element.
See: Character encoding, entity references and UTF-8 - A short introduction [webmasterworld.com]
You can't just switch between two charset declarations without there being a risk of problems, even when the site is in English - ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 are not directly interchangeable.
Heh! Where were you years ago when we had another discussion about this and I did a find and replace on 500+ pages not realizing that there were going to be encoding issues. That kept me up for a good couple of hours in cleanup mode. I haven't even attempted to do that again. New sites, UTF-8. Previous sites that are not broken, ISO-8859-1. I don't see any reason to change something that has had zero impact on anything that I can think of.
The whole character entity issue is a challenge to say the least. ;)
Propools, I'd do one page at a time. Use the W3 Validator to tell you exactly what is borken. That thing will fail in a heartbeat as soon as it encounters a character issue. It's a different type of FAIL too, not your typical HTML Validation FAIL. :)
