Character encodings in HTML: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 15:51, 25 February 2002

Revision as of 05:47, 19 September 2002

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Either method advises the receiver that the file being sent uses the character set specified. Of course, it would be a very bad idea to send incorrect information. For example, a server where multiple users may place files created on different machines cannot promise that all the files it sends will conform (some users may have machines with different character sets). For this reason, many servers simply do not send the information at all, to avoid making any false promises.

Browsers receiving a file with no character set information must make a blind assumption. The safest is probably to assume [[ISO- 8859-1]], but it is also common for browsers to assume the character set native to the machine on which they are running. The consequence of choosing incorrectly is that characters outside the printable ASCII range (32 to 126) may appear incorrectly. This presents few problems for English-speaking users, but European users require characters outside that range for everyday use.

It is important to point out that successful viewing of a page is not necessarilty an indication that it is encoded correctly. If the creator of a page and the reader are both assuming some machine-specific character set, and the server does not send any identifying information, then the reader will nonetheless see the page as the creator intended, but other readers with different native sets will not.