Tag(s): tutorial-char-enc

Håndtering af tegnkodninger i HTML og CSS (Handling character encodings in HTML and CSS)

This article was translated into Danish thanks to Çiğdem Küçük (Copypanthers). This is the first translation into Danish of an Internationalization Activity article.

Umgang mit Zeichencodierungen in HTML und CSS (Handling character encodings in HTML and CSS)

Zeichencodierungen: grundlegende Konzepte (Character encodings: Essential concepts)

Eine Zeichencodierung wählen und anwenden (Choosing & applying a character encoding)

Das BOM (byte-order mark) in HTML (The byte-order mark (BOM) in HTML)

Normalisierung in HTML und CSS (Normalization in HTML and CSS)

These articles were translated into German thanks to Gunnar Bittersmann.

Ukrainian:

Вибір і застосування кодування (Choosing & applying a character encoding)

Призначення кодування символів в HTML (Declaring character encodings in HTML)

Призначення кодування символів в CSS (Declaring character encodings in CSS)

Кодування символів: Основні поняття (Character encodings: Essential concepts)

Russian:

Выбор и применение кодирования (Choosing & applying a character encoding)

Назначение кодировки символов в HTML (Declaring character encodings in HTML)

Назначение кодировки символов в CSS (Declaring character encodings in CSS)

Кодирование символов: Основные понятия (Character encodings: Essential concepts)

These articles were translated thanks to Alexandr Shlapak.

Obsługa kodowania znaków w HTML i CSS (Handling character encodings in HTML and CSS)

This tutorial was translated into Polish thanks to Bartosz Matusiak.

Ukrainian: Обробка кодування символів в HTML і CSS (Handling character encodings in HTML and CSS)

Russian: Обработка кодирования символов в HTML и CSS (Handling character encodings in HTML and CSS)

These articles were translated thanks to Alexandr Shlapak.

Content from this tutorial was distributed across several new and existing articles to reduce duplication and improve usability and maintainability. The completely rewritten tutorial provides a succinct summary of advice at the start, and then gathers together and organizes pointers to articles that, taken together, help you grasp the subject matter. The title was also changed.

Content derived from the previous version of the tutorial (ie. in the new articles) has been updated to include HTML5.

View the tutorial.

Comments are being sought on the following new articles prior to final publication:

1. Handling character encodings in HTML and CSS
2. Essential definitions related to character encodings
3. Choosing & applying a character encoding
4. Character encoding declarations in HTML
5. The byte-order mark (BOM) in HTML
6. Normalization in HTML and CSS
7. Characters or markup?

These articles have been derived from the former tutorial, which has already undergone a review. Since then, HTML5 has been brought to the fore in the articles and various small changes have been added, including some short summary information.

The three updated articles are the result of merging the tutorial material with existing articles. They are:

• CSS character encoding declarations
• Using character escapes in markup and CSS
• Serving XHTML 1.0

The character encoding section of the techniques page relating to HTML and CSS authoring has also been overhauled, to include the new material.

Please send any comments to www-international@w3.org (subscribe). We hope to publish a final version in one to two weeks.

Comments are being sought on this article prior to final release. Please send any comments to www-international@w3.org (subscribe). We expect to publish a final version in one to two weeks.

This is an update, in a temporary location, of the tutorial Character sets & encodings in XHTML, HTML and CSS. (Please be careful about bookmarking the location, since it is only temporary.)

A lot of new material was added, eg. related to the UTF-8 BOM, normalization, etc., and the material was rearranged significantly. The rearrangement was to downplay slightly the XHTML 1.0 issues, given that that is now only relevant to IE6, but also to help readers more quickly find information they need for the format they are dealing with.

The explicit distinction between XHTML 1.0 and XHTML 1.1 with regard to MIME types was removed, since the XHTML2 WG is hopefully very close to issuing a PER that enables XHTML 1.1 to be served as text/html.

The update adds information about HTML5.

Where a section corresponds to an article that has been updated, those updates were also migrated to this document.

This tutorial was updated to reflect the fact that IE7 no longer flips into quirks mode when an XML declaration is used. For a detailed list of changes read the full post.

The following paragraphs were changed as shown by the ins and del markup.

<p>In browsers such as <ins>Internet Explorer 7, Firefox,</ins><del>Mozilla</del>, Netscape, Opera, and others, with or without the XML declaration, a page served with a DOCTYPE declaration will be rendered in standards mode.</p>
<p> With Internet Explorer<ins> 6</ins>, however, if anything appears before the DOCTYPE declaration the page is rendered in quirks mode. </p>
<p>Because Internet Explorer <ins> 6</ins> users <ins>still</ins> count for a very large proportion of browser users, this is a significant issue. If you want to ensure that your pages are rendered in the same way on all standards-compliant browsers, you need to think carefully about how you deal with this.</p>
<p>The presence of an XML declaration in an XHTML 1.0 file served as HTML will cause your file to be rendered in quirks mode on Internet Explorer <ins> 6</ins> (and therefore for a potentially large proportion of your audience).</p>

If a user agent (eg. a browser) is unable to detect the character encoding used in a Web document, the user may be presented with unreadable text. This information is particularly important for those maintaining and extending a multilingual site, but declaring the character encoding of the document is important for anyone producing XHTML/HTML or CSS. This tutorial will give you an understanding of the topic that will help you make the right choices when doing so. The topic is not as straightforward as it may sometimes appear, and the advice contained here is the end result of a great deal of thought and discussion.

After reading this tutorial you should:

• get advice on choosing an encoding for XHTML/HTML documents
• understand when and how to declare the character encoding (charset) for documents using XHTML/HTML and CSS
• have a grasp of aspects of serving and coding XHTML/HTML files that affect the above
• know when and how to use escapes and entities to represent characters