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Latest revision as of 19:19, 3 January 2009
Using UTF-8
Many folks using and authoring microformats have found that consistent use of UTF-8 in the toolchain helps ensure that microformatted international content (i.e. with non-ASCII7 characters) is preserved from publication to indexing to aggregation and addition to desktop applicaions. (You could say I personally have some incentive to get this to all work properly, or rather, that I end up being a good test case ;) Tantek Çelik
Tips
HTML
- Use valid (X)HTML. Preferably XHTML 1.0 Strict.
- Specify the character-set explicitly as UTF-8, e.g. with
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
e.g. here is a complete valid XHTML 1.0 Strict UTF-8 document
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Valid XHTML 1.0 UTF-8 document</title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
Sidenote: this (meta http-equiv) is perhaps the *only* meta tag worth using in an (X)HTML document.
- AVOID the
?xmlprolog for sending the page as XHTML or XML.- It is undesirable because it causes IE6/Windows to go into quirks mode.
- It is also unecessary
- Thus delete this if you see it at the top of your document:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
Web Server
Make sure that you have configured the web server to also send the character set as UTF-8 for HTML documents. E.g. for Apache, you can put this in your .htaccess file:
AddType 'text/html; charset=UTF-8' .html
Middleware
- Make sure that your middleware languages, tools, and frameworks (i.e. PHP, Python, Perl, XSLT, Tidy) are all using UTF-8 aware string handling functions.
Database
- Use UTF-8 string fields in your databases.
- Configure your database accordingly
- For Postgres, use:
client_encoding = "UTF-8"
- For Postgres, use: