gyoza on 27 Dec 2004 18:53:14 -0000


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Re: [PLUG] html, character entities and ISO-8859-1 

Jeff Abrahamson wrote:

Does anyone know whether html character entities like é for é
and so forth are required substitutions or merely provided for
convenience of those with keyboards that don't support these accents?

I'm writing a web page in French and it's much harder to write, for
example, "j'ai été reçu", than to write "j'ai été
reçu".

Looking at examples on the web, I see a fair number that appear to be
encoded in 8859-1, but I also see enough non-conforming sites that I
don't want to make rash assumptions.  And I don't want to write a page
that some people can't read.

Thanks much for any informed notes or pointers.



I lean toward UTF-8. That way I can have English and even Japanese text without changing the encoding.

You could write the text as you normally do, then run the markup through HTML Tidy, which should be able to convert the characters to entities if you tell it to.

Some browsers can't handle all of the entities. And I don't know why is would be preferable to use codes instead of the characters. I would browse the http://w3c.org/ site for recommendations.
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