[thelist] Character Encoding Mismatch

Clive R Sweeney clive at designshift.com
Sat Oct 12 13:45:01 CDT 2002


Just fixing a few last glitches in a revamped site for Mount Olive
College - http://www.moc.edu/index.cfm - and the validation works fine
on most pages as hosted on our staging server, but on the actual Mount
Olive site I get a warning as follows: "Warning: Character Encoding
mismatch! The character encoding specified in the HTTP header (<utf-8>)
is different from the one specified in the META element (<iso-8859-1>).
I will use <utf-8> for this validation."

I found the following explanation on
http://linuxquality.sunsite.dk/articles/validationtest/:

"The <meta> declaration is needed when posting the page on most web
sites because those sites' web servers do not declare a character
encoding explicitly in the HTTP headers. However, some web servers do
provide an explicit character encoding, and a server provides one, it
might conflict with the one declared in the <meta> element. This may
confuse both web browsers and validators.

"What you should do in that case is either remove the explicit <meta>
element character encoding declaration from your copy of the document,
or change it to match the character encoding declared in the web
server's HTTP headers."

Is this good advice, or should I leave the character encoding as it is?


... clive




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