Document Encoding

hittjett · #1 (**permalink**) 02-25-2004, 02:10 PM

Should I be worried about my document encoding setting? I see that I can include a meta tag stating what the encoding is, but I don't really understand it. And if I need to specify, which encoding should I use?

thanks,

minstrel · #2 (**permalink**) 02-26-2004, 12:06 AM

It depends on how your pages are constructed, really.

Do you NEED a DOCTYPE declaration? No... if it's missing, most browsers will default to "loose" or "quirks" mode and Internet Explorer, the browser used by 90% or more of internet users, will be quite happy.

If you want to include a DOCTYPE declaration, in most cases you should probably use this:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

unless you are sure that your coding meets the "strict" standards.

References:

Microsoft Information on DOCTYPE

SpiderWebWoman tutorial

Mel · #3 (**permalink**) 02-26-2004, 12:22 AM

Hi Jett:
I would guess we are talking about english language pages and the content-type meta equivalent tag?

The character encoding tag (<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> is a method of converting bytes into characters which is needed in order to display an HTML document. For documents in English and most other Western European languages, the widely supported encoding ISO-8859-1 is typically used and pretty well covers languages which use the Latin character set.

adore · #4 (**permalink**) 02-28-2004, 04:32 PM

I think that setting up proper encoding helps with rankings in local searches (in Google, for example).

hittjett · #5 (**permalink**) 02-29-2004, 12:33 PM

Thank you for the input.

Cheers,