[sclug] Character encoding - summary

[Simon Heywood]

On Thu,  7 Dec 2006 14:55:46 +0000, Peter Brewer wrote:
> 1) Set the encoding in your web server e.g. in Apache using the 
> directive "AddDefaultCharset iso-8859-1".  This is of course server wide 
> though so may not be terribly desirable.
> 
> 2) Set the encoding in the headers, in my case using PHP: 
> header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1");

3) Use .htaccess:

http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-htaccess-charset

What's wrong with UTF-8, though?

> So in answer to Sean's question - no I haven't found another way to do 
> it using META tags.

I've always thought of most META tags as a bit crappy anyway, largely
because of all those 'you are being redirected' type pages. Information
like character encoding should really be presented as protocol-supplied
metadata, not as part of the document itself - that's like reaching in
through the window to unbolt the door.

S.