Next message: Liam Quinn: "RE: Character set question"
From: "Bertilo Wennergren" <bertilow@hem.passagen.se>
To: <www-validator@w3.org>
Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2001 18:51:33 +0100
Message-ID: <HBECLJECMMGNJGANOJEPCEAJCEAA.bertilow@hem.passagen.se>
Subject: RE: Character set question
Kathleen Anderson:
> 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">
Yes.
> If so, why?
"iso-8859-1" is, as the name shows, an ISO standard, while
"windows-1252" is, as the name indicates, a Microsoft thingy. On
the web, where the clients could be on any system, not necessarily
Windows, a standard code is to be preferred.
In reality windows-1252 has very wide support even outside of
Microsoft products, but iso-8859-1, being actually a subset
of windows-1252, has even more support, and is thus a safer
bet.
Actually coding anything outside of ASCII as "&#decimal_number;"
and declaring the "charset" as "utf-8", preferrably in the
http-header, is the safest bet of all. That can hardly fail
at all. (The "utf-8" declaration is not really necessary, but
it will help circumvent bugs in Netscape 4, and it is not wrong.)
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Bertilo Wennergren
<http://purl.oclc.org/net/bertilo>
<bertilow@chello.se>
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