[thelist] character set meta tag placement

Sarah Sweeney mr.sanders at designshift.com
Wed Dec 8 14:35:34 CST 2004


In trying to solve the problem I sent a message about earlier, I read 
"The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively 
Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)" on 
joelonsoftware.com:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

This is an excerpt from the article regarding the placement of the 
character set meta tag:

> Luckily, almost every encoding in common use does the same thing with
> characters between 32 and 127, so you can always get this far on the
> HTML page without starting to use funny letters:
>   <html>
>   <head>
>   <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
> But that meta tag really has to be the very first thing in the <head>
> section because as soon as the web browser sees this tag it's going to
> stop parsing the page and start over after reinterpreting the whole page
> using the encoding you specified.

My question is, what if that meta tag is not the *very* first thing in 
the head section? Will it be ignored, or will it just mean the browser 
starts reinterpreting the page a little bit later (which might cause a 
small increase in page load time)?

-- 
Sarah Sweeney  ::  Web Developer & Programmer
Portfolio  ::  http://sarah.designshift.com
Blog  ::  http://hardedge.ca


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