using-utf-8

2008-12-19T14:03:05Z

AcletOdomv: celtsitvidar

trerbocna
= 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 ;) [http://tantek.com/log/ Tantek Ãelik]

__TOC__

== Tips ==

=== HTML ===

* Use [http://validator.w3.org/ valid] (X)HTML. Preferably XHTML 1.0 Strict.
* Specify the character-set explicitly as UTF-8, e.g. with

<pre><nowiki>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
</nowiki></pre>

e.g. here is a complete valid XHTML 1.0 Strict UTF-8 document

<pre><nowiki>
<!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>
</nowiki></pre>

Sidenote: this (meta http-equiv) is perhaps the *only* meta tag worth using in an (X)HTML document.

* AVOID the <code>?xml</code> prolog for sending the page as XHTML or XML.
** It is undesirable because it causes IE6/Windows to go into quirks mode.
** It is also [http://tantek.com/XHTML/Test/minimal.html#variants unecessary]
** Thus delete this if you see it at the top of your document: <code><nowiki><?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?></nowiki></code>

=== 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:

<pre><nowiki>
AddType 'text/html; charset=UTF-8' .html
</nowiki></pre>

=== 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: <code>client_encoding = "UTF-8"</code>

Microformats Wiki - User contributions [en]

using-utf-8