Basic .html webpages and encoding types when saving; does it make any difference?

[Clint1]

I don't see an appropriate forum to ask this, so I have to ask it here. I recently changed from the cPanel "x2" to the "x3" type theme/layout for my main website. Among the differences, in the "Legacy File Manager" area when you open any page it asks about the encoding you want to use. (This does not happen with the x2 theme). It then selects or guesses on the encoding and you can go with that, or select another from a REALLY LONG list in a drop-down menu. (I found out that prompt can be bypassed by changing a setting in the current non-legacy File Manager). But the options are still there if you want to change encoding. Also once the page is opened and you go to edit it, at the top is also the drop-down menu about the encoding which you can choose when saving the page changes.

So here's what I don't understand. All of my .html pages were created the same way, either in Notepad or Metapad, basic text. So why is it the detected encoding is so different for my .html pages? Here's a list of the encodings for few I opened to check this:
ansi_x3.110-1983
iso-8859-1
us-ascii
big5

Again, these are all the same basic .html types of webpages. Now I would have thought all of them would be "us-ascii". But as you can see, they are not. There may be even more encoding types. How did they get this way? Does it really make any difference, or should I re-save all the pages as us-ascii? Is there any search engine advantages by using one type of encoding or the same encoding for all pages?

BTW, I tried changing one of the "big5" detected pages to the us-ascii option and it would not take! It kept going back to "big5". And, the type of fonts you see in the edit window (which displays the source code) are totally different for this "big5". All the other types are shown as the same font, but "big5" looks rather "scrunched up". (The fonts people see on the webpages, all look the same and as they should).

Thanks.

[kgun]

I don't see an appropriate forum to ask this, so I have to ask it here. I recently changed from the cPanel "x2" to the "x3" type theme/layout for my main website. Among the differences, in the "Legacy File Manager" area when you open any page it asks about the encoding you want to use. (This does not happen with the x2 theme).

I don't know about x2 and x3. New to me. Do we need further information to answer your question? Nevertheless here is my fast contribution.

Basic .html webpages and encoding types when saving; does it make any difference?

So here's what I don't understand. All of my .html pages were created the same way, either in Notepad or Metapad, basic text. So why is it the detected encoding is so different for my .html pages? Here's a list of the encodings for few I opened to check this:
ansi_x3.110-1983
iso-8859-1
us-ascii
big5

May be I misunderstand your questions / problem, but I use Dreamweaver 2004 mx and have no problems. A List apart is the authoritative site on encoding and document types. DigitalStart.net: The starting point for English speaking surfers and webmasters (see second item on vertical menu below "Start" on the horizontal tool bar).

Is there any search engine advantages by using one type of encoding or the same encoding for all pages?

Do you mean SEO advantage?

[wige]

As far as different encodings, most are the same for the lower ASCII characters. I believe for the ones you list you shouldn't have a problem as they are all comprable - the difference is in the extended characters which would not be used in most cases on a US site.

Notepad does have a default encoding, based on the computer you are using. If you switch between computers it is possible you could end up saving some files with different encodings. It is also possible that X3 can't determine which encoding you are using and is just making a guess, which is probably based on a limited charset causing it to guess different encodings for different documents.

[Clint1]

I don't know about x2 and x3. New to me. Do we need further information to answer your question? Nevertheless here is my fast contribution.

Thanks, like I said x2 didn't have those options, so you may need to be familiar with x3 to know what I mean.

Do you mean SEO advantage?

I guess that's what I mean. I'm wondering if one's pages are something odd like "big5" could have a negative effect on SE bot spidering, as compared to another encoding like us-ascii.

[Clint1]

As far as different encodings, most are the same for the lower ASCII characters. I believe for the ones you list you shouldn't have a problem as they are all comprable - the difference is in the extended characters which would not be used in most cases on a US site.

What do you mean by "lower" ASCII characters and "extended"? As in case, or something else? I use &#064 for the @ symbol, (I had to remove the ; from that code), and some other things like © and & , does that have anything to do with this? I don't need to worry about any of this for basic USA/English text and fonts?

It is also possible that X3 can't determine which encoding you are using and is just making a guess, which is probably based on a limited charset causing it to guess different encodings for different documents.

Yeah that's what I mentioned it was doing, it even says it's guessing (something like "..our best to determine the type of encoding used..."). But my concern was, does it matter if it doesn't get it right?

Thanks.

[wige]

There are a few variables that effect the default encoding - program, operating system and file system, etc. Generally, however, English characters can be represented in 8 bits or less (ASCII is actually 7 bits, 8859 is 8, etc). Longer encodings allow for larger sets of characters.

Basically, encoding is something you can't see - it is different from what & is converted to in a browser - the encoding is actually indicating how the &, a, m, p and ; are stored on the hard drive or transmitted from system to system as ones and zeros. For example, an ASCII encoding indicates that each character is 7 bits long. 8859 indicates that each character is 8 bits long. And UTF-16BE indicates that each character is 16 bits long, sorted differently than UTF-16LE. If the wrong encoding is selected, you will usually see the problem quickly in a text editor because the characters will be all garbled. However, in many encodings that have similar lengths, the lower portion of the character (first 7-8 bits in a 16-bit or larger encoding system) will be the same - you might not realize you are using the wrong encoding until you enter a character in the extended space, such as an international accent mark.

[deepsand]

What do you mean by "lower" ASCII characters and "extended"?

The original ASCII code provided for 7 data bits & an optional parity bit, which, when not used, was set to zero; thus, a maximum of 128 characters, decimal values 0 thru 127, was supported.

Extended ASCII incorporated the 8th bit into the data bits, thus doubling the number of supported characters to 256.

The tables at Ascii Table - ASCII character codes and html, octal, hex and decimal chart conversion show both the original, or lower, 128 characters as well as the most commonly used set of upper 128 ones.

Unlike ASCII, UTF (Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable length encoding method, ranging from 1 to 4 bytes. Single byte characters in the value range 0 to 127 represent the same characters as does 7 bit ASCII, thus providing for backward compatibility.

Thus, an application that is expecting data to be in a particular encoding, i.e. ASCII or UTF, will, when presented with data in the other, properly display such only if all bytes have values in the lower ASCII range of 0 to 127.

[Clint1]

Thanks for all the info guys, but I'm still not clear on answers to these:

I'm wondering if one's pages are something odd like "big5" or other, could have a negative effect on SE bot spidering, as compared to another encoding like us-ascii.

And ......it even says it's guessing (something like "..our best to determine the type of encoding used..."). But my concern was, does it matter if it doesn't get it right?

(Deepsand did you ever get the email I sent? I sent it to the address to gave me. And I see you edited your post due to spelling, check out ieSpell - Spell Checker add-on for Internet Explorer it checks/fixes typos for any text input boxes, works on IE5 and later).

[deepsand]

The meta tag "charset" parameter is used for declaring the character set being used by a document.

The tag for this page, for example, is <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" /> .

Note, though, that server settings can override in-document declarations.

For more, see W3C I18n article: Character encodings .

Got your e-mail; will get to as soon as I can.

[Clint1]

Ok....thanks again for the info.....but.....

Thanks for all the info guys, but I'm still not clear on answers to these:

I'm wondering if one's pages are something odd like "big5" or other, could have a negative effect on SE bot spidering, as compared to another encoding like us-ascii.

And ......it even says it's guessing (something like "..our best to determine the type of encoding used..."). But my concern was, does it matter if the File Manager doesn't get it right?