The Web Standards Group recommends that
UCSB Web pages always specify the character encoding, either
through the http header or the <meta> tag. Character encoding
tells the browser how to correctly render characters in the page.
Unicode Transform Format (UTF) character encoding is part of
the XHTML standard; it can represent almost all characters currently
in use worldwide and makes it possible to stream over a network.
The preferred method of indicating the encoding is by using
the charset parameter of the Content-Type HTTP header. For example,
to specify that an HTML document uses utf-8, a server would send
the following header (note that utf-8 is also the default encoding):
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
It is also possible to specify the Content-Type using a <meta>
tag within the document itself:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=iso-8859-5">
Sometimes a Web page is in another language with a different
character set. For example if the content is in Russian, as indicated
by the charset referenced in the meta tag example above, then
the character encoding will need to reflect that. The Internet
Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is the organization responsible
for naming character sets used on the Internet: http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets
References:
http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/tutorial-char-enc/
http://www.htmlhelp.org/tools/validator/charset.html
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