[thelist] carnfounded Character Encodings

Tom Dell'Aringa pixelmech at yahoo.com
Thu Oct 30 09:12:01 CST 2003


--- Tom wrote:

> > Ok, all I want to do is understand Character Encodings once and
> > for all

--- Paul Cowan <evolt at funkwit.com> wrote:
> I don't claim to be an expert, but perhaps if you want a
> non-exploding head, Joel Spolsky of "Joel On Software" fame has 
> written a pretty good basic explanation of character sets...
> <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html>

Okay, that was quite excellent! Now based on this it seems as though
the following should be in every document I create:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

This seems to give me the largest character set available, and that
set is in fact well organized, documented and so on.

So my question that goes hand in hand with this - other than the
unicode site, is there a reference for special characters using this
charset online somewhere? Is the preferred method the u#### way?

Also, I assume with utf-8 entities like &amp; and &copy; would still
work - but would that be correct? Would it work in all cases or
should one use the unicode equivalent?

Tom



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