RE: character encosing

["Andrew Warren" <awarren -at- synaptics -dot- com>]

e-letter wrote:

> What I don't understand: if person A posts a message to the mailing
> list in character set iso-8859-1 and my browser is made to view also
> in iso-8859-1, some characters are illegible (e.g. a black diamond
> encircling a question mark) ?

    Rene:

    It could be a few things.  Most likely, one of the many servers
    through which the email traveled handles non-ASCII character
    encodings poorly.

> How best should technical authors consider various character
> encoding, e.g. when creating an html formatted document, such that
> all characters are legible?
> 
> Personally, I like utf-8.

    UTF-8 is a great choice.  The only thing you have to remember is
    that there's a chicken-and-egg problem: Since the tag that defines
    the encoding is part of the document, the browser has to be able to
    read it before it knows what encoding the document uses.  Therefore,
    the tag has to be AT THE TOP of your html document (I'll omit the
    brackets around the tags so they won't cause problems for braindead
    mail clients):

    html
    head
    meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"

    This works because nearly every encoding defines the characters in
    those three lines identically... So a browser'll understand them no
    matter what encoding it defaults to.

    -Andrew

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