Keyword(s): tutorial-char-enc

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. [search keys: tutorial-char-enc]

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A page is now available that points to material supporting Richard Ishida's tutorial at the World Wide Web Conference in Edinburgh at the end of May. Modules include:

• Practical and Cultural Issues
• Character sets & encodings in XHTML, HTML and CSS
• Declaring language in XHTML and HTML
• Understanding the new language tags
• Script issues (read about text direction and text wrapping in particular)
• Creating (X)HTML Pages in Arabic & Hebrew
• Script issues (read text direction and text wrapping in particular)
• CSS3 and International Text

[search key: talk-2006 talk-ishida]

Presentation by Richard Ishida at the 25th Internationalization & Unicode Conference in Washington DC, USA on 31 March, 2004. [search keys: talk-2004 talk-ishida]

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