What is best character encoding for a French language site?

[spiderbait]

Does anyone know what is the best character encoding to use for a French language website?

I've used "iso-8859-1" for my Quebec clients in the past and it seems to work quite well most of the time.

However, in some cases (such as certain SERPs from MSN and other SEs) the character encoding gets messed up and returns things like "é" instead of "é". Also, in certain places like the <title> tag, where characters need to be kept short, the required characters to display "é" take up a lot of space like this "&eacute;".

Does anyone have a suggestion or know of a resource library dealing with this issue?

As a clarification, I'm not only concerned with accessibility, but also with search engine friendliness. I want the site to rank well as a credible French language resource and for the SERPS to display characters correctly.

Thanks in advance,
Jade

[Webnauts]

iso-8859-1 is fine.

Have a look here though: http://www.webstandards.org/learn/ar...skw3c/dec2002/ and if this does not help, let me know. :)

Some additional info: http://tlt.psu.edu/suggestions/inter...ge/french.html

[spiderbait]

Hi Webnauts,

Thanks for the links. I'm reading through everything and will hopefully figure out why the SERPS sometimes display incorrect characters as I described above.

I appreciate your help.

Jade

[malmazan]

Those SE just suck.

Too often the anglo-saxon world forgets that other characters exist.

[EditFast]

Why not use Unicode rather than the specific language charset?

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by malmazan

Those SE just suck.

Too often the anglo-saxon world forgets that other characters exist.

That is not true. I guess some people are not aware of encoding and charsets. ;)

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by spiderbait

Hi Webnauts,

Thanks for the links. I'm reading through everything and will hopefully figure out why the SERPS sometimes display incorrect characters as I described above.

Jade, only Yahoo, ExaLead and WiseNut have problems with words written using HTML hexidecimal entities.