Re: ISO-10646 in HTML 4.01

Hello Seething,

First, ISO 10646 is the *document character set* for HTML and XML.
What that means is that any HTML or XML processor is supposed to
behave as if it thought in ISO 10646 (aka Unicode), independent
of how this is implemented.

ISO 10646 as such (with or without hyphen, upper or lower case) is
not a 'charset' (or character encoding), i.e. it does not define how
to map from characters to bytes (or more importantly and correctly,
from bytes to characters).

Character encodings that cover all of iso 10646/Unicode are e.g.
utf-8 and utf-16. But your page doesn't seem to contain anything
outside us-ascii, and so you could even use charset=us-ascii.
utf-8 is upwards compatible to that, so you could also use utf-8.

There is no single one-and-only character encoding on the Web.
The most important things are that:
- You choose one this is used widely (us-ascii, utf-8, iso-8859-1,...)
- You make sure that you know what you actually use
- You make sure that you label your pages correctly.

You will have to make very similar decisions for XHTML, so there
is no waste of time if you think about it now.

Regards,  Martin.

At 23:25 01/08/08 -0400, $B%!(Bee$B+I(Bing$B%1%&(B wrote:
>Hello, I am currently trying to bring my site up to specs, and I have
>the following meta tag on my page. Your validator does not seem to
>support this charset, yet on your site you specify that THIS IS the most
>current charset and is recommended. What I need to know is, am I doing
>this correctly, because I copied this code from a reputable help
>website, yet it seems to cause a validation error (Shouldn't it all be
>in lower case?). Is ISO-10646 the current recommended charset for
>HTML4.01 documents written in American English?
>
><META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-10646">
>
>I believe for now, I will remove the charset tag completely.....since I
>do not know which charset to use! Advice would be greatly appreciated!
>Here is my URL: http://www.seething13.com
>It is very hard to find easy to understand info on this topic, and I am
>dead set on writing a tutorial for other to refer to once I figure it
>all out! This is very frustrating! OH, and what's this about XHTML 1.0?
>Should I even BOTHER trying to conform to HTML 4.01 if XHTML 1.0 is
>going to replace it soon? I'm sorry to ask so much but I HAVE been
>surfing your site for 3 days now and still have not found the answers I
>am looking for.
>
>Many thanks,
>
>Seething

Received on Wednesday, 8 August 2001 23:51:33 UTC