RE: Character set question

From: Thanasis Kinias (tkinias@asu.edu)
Date: Wed, Mar 07 2001

  • Next message: Bertilo Wennergren: "RE: Character set question" 

    Date: Wed, 07 Mar 2001 10:26:08 -0700
From: Thanasis Kinias <tkinias@asu.edu>
To: "'Kathleen Anderson'" <kathleen@spiderwebwoman.com>
Cc: www-validator@w3.org
Message-id: <A021872EC2BDD411AB3600902746A055016047AE@mainex4.asu.edu>
Subject: RE: Character set question

Kathleen Anderson wrote:

> Could someone explain, in layperson's terms, if using <meta 
> http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> is 
> preferred over <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; 
> charset=windows-1252">

The short answer is "you don't need either, most of the time."  The default
charset is UTF-8, which is identical to ISO Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1).  You only
need to specify Windows 1252 if you are using non-Unicode Windows software
and have "hard-coded" characters such as euro sign, daggers, em dash, which
are where Latin-1 and Windows 1252 differ.  If you use entities (e.g.,
&#8212; for an em dash) or compose with Unicode-compliant software, you are
safe skipping the charset declaration.

Of course, if you're coding in Gujarati or Korean that's another story . . .

Thanasis Kinias
Information Dissemination Team, Information Technology
Arizona State University
Tempe, Ariz., U.S.A.

Qui nos rodunt confundantur
et cum iustis non scribantur.