using-utf-8

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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 ;) Tantek Çelik

Tips

HTML

  • Use valid (X)HTML. Preferably XHTML 1.0 Strict.
  • Specify the character-set explicitly as UTF-8, e.g. with
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

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

 <!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>

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

  • AVOID the ?xml 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 unecessary
    • Thus delete this if you see it at the top of your document: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

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:

 AddType 'text/html; charset=UTF-8' .html

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: client_encoding = "UTF-8"