What are potential problems using "charset=utf-8" instead of "charset=iso-8859-1"?

Volitics

Hello;

I just upgraded to a virtual private server. Upon validating the Html pages using the w3 validator (http://validator.w3.org/) this message appears:

"Character Encoding mismatch!
The character encoding specified in the HTTP header (utf-8) is different from the value in the <meta> element (iso-8859-1). I will use the value from the HTTP header (utf-8) for this validation."

I figured out that the new server was set to "charset=utf-8". The shared hosting that I had been using was apparently set to "charset=iso-8859-1".

This article seems to think that you should use the "charset=utf-8" character set..
http://www.w3.org/International/O-charset
Maybe I'm just not reading it right but the article does not seem to give a clear answer as to why to use the UTF-8 charset instead of the iso-8859 charset.

I am still new at learning to use the shell line command for the Apache server. I can go in and change the UTF-8 setting to the iso-8859 setting if necessary.

My question is: If I leave the server setting at the UTF-8 setting and change all of the meta tags in the headers to UTF-8 so it will validate with the w3 validator are there any potential problems that I might encounter with my coding?

Thanks.

laserlight

Maybe I'm just not reading it right but the article does not seem to give a clear answer as to why to use the UTF-8 charset instead of the iso-8859 charset.

You are not reading it right :p
That document links to Tutorial: Character sets & encodings in XHTML, HTML and CSS, which has a section on "Consider using a Unicode encoding".

Volitics

laserlight;

Thanks for responding.

The web site for the White House does not even have a charset declaration.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/

If you run the front page of the white house dot gov web site through the w3 validator there are 168 lines of red errors. 🙂
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.whitehouse.gov%2F

laserlight

Volitics wrote:
The web site for the White House does not even have a charset declaration.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/

If you run the front page of the white house dot gov web site through the w3 validator there are 168 lines of red errors. 🙂
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.whitehouse.gov%2F

Thank you for the information. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), I am not in charge of that website 😉

bradgrafelman

Volitics wrote:
The web site for the White House does not even have a charset declaration.

Since when have we looked towards the White House for any kind of wisdom? :o

Crowly

Volitics wrote:
My question is: If I leave the server setting at the UTF-8 setting and change all of the meta tags in the headers to UTF-8 so it will validate with the w3 validator are there any potential problems that I might encounter with my coding?

Thanks.

If the server settings are set to UTF-8 it doesnt matter what you set the meta tags to, they get ignored.

From apaches httpd.conf

# Specify a default charset for all content served; this enables

interpretation of all content as UTF-8 by default. To use the

default browser choice (ISO-8859-1), or to allow the META tags

in HTML content to override this choice, comment out this

directive:

#
#AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

So comment out AddDefaultCharset UTF-8 like ive done above and restart the service/server, then you can set any charset you like with the meta tags, and the validator will use that.

After i had to reinstall my LAMP server, i forgot to comment out "AddDefaultCharset UTF-8". The web pages i was currently working on was coded in ISO-8859-1, and the only problem i saw was that the norwegain special chars (æøå) didnt display correctly, just got a ? symbol in their place.

Edit: Dont know much about the pro's and con's of the different charsets, but i found this message on the php.net site when checking out the mail() function (http://no.php.net/manual/en/ref.mail.php)

i strongly feel that internet site developers should exclusively use UTF-8 text encoding / character setting over ISO-8859-1... UTF-8 is universal and will display all characters as they were meant to be displayed, whereas ISO-8859-1 is prone to garbled text.

bradgrafelman

Also note that PHP has a default_charset directive.