Which Code Is Better?

by Don Schenk

Posted: 14 years ago 6 replies

WEB DESIGN

I have been designing with Dreamweaver CS3, before that GoLive, with some KompoZer and before that Nvu.

Sometime I have this character set:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

Other time I have this character set:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

Can I use either? Or is one better than the other?

Thanks

:-Don

#code

Manfred Ekblad 14 years ago

This article (from 2003!) by the Joel on Software-guy explains a bit about character sets:

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) - Joel on Software

I recommend you to use utf-8. Make sure you use that as your setting in your html-editor as well.
- [ 1 ] Thanks
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Don Schenk

14 years ago

Thanks Manfred,

Good article too. Now I know beyond any reasonable doubt that when I grow up I don't want to be a coder.

In KompoZer I found the toggle between UTF-8 and ISO 8859 so I can choose.

Anybody know where that is in Dreamweaver? I've looked and looked, and even the "help" menue is not a help.

:-Don

Thanks
1 reply

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Amsterdam

14 years ago

Originally Posted by Don Schenk

In KompoZer I found the toggle between UTF-8 and ISO 8859 so I can choose.

Anybody know where that is in Dreamweaver? I've looked and looked, and even the "help" menue is not a help.

:-Don

View the page source and you will see the tag in the <head> section near the top. Hope this helps.

T

Thanks

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infibook 14 years ago

...well i recommend this <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">]

try to have look on other web pages click their site and view their page source and you will they the utf-8 rather than iso-8859
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VicFranks 14 years ago

Don,

- Open DW
- Hit Ctrl+U That will open your preferences panel. "You can also go to edit and choose preferences"

- Choose New Document, you will see your encoding settings there.

Vic.
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intellekt 14 years ago

UTF-8 works fine for pure HTML4 pages.

ISO-8859-1 since it is more widely supported than us-ascii. It also narrows the encoding down a little bit. It is the natural choice
- Thanks
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