Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Choosing the declaration method

The declaration method you use depends on the type of document you are authoring and its encoding method.

HTML documents

The encoding should be specified on the server and again in the document with a meta element. This makes sure the encoding is easily accessible and stays with the document should it be saved for later use.

XHTML 1.0 documents served as HTML

The encoding should be specified on the server and again in the document with a meta element. If the encoding is something other than UTF-8 or UTF-16, and the document is likely to be parsed as XML (not just HTML), then also include the encoding in an XML header. Be aware that the inclusion of the XML declaration may cause rendering problems for some browsers.

XHTML (1.0 and 1.1) documents served as XML

The encoding should be specified on the server and by using the encoding attribute in the XML declaration. Although not strictly required for UTF-8 and UTF-16 encodings, it doesn’t hurt to include it anyway.

Tip

This strategy for declaring character encodings is outlined in a tutorial on the W3C’s Internationalization site (http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/tutorial-char-enc/). For another approach, see the article “WaSP Asks the W3C: Specifying Character Encoding” on the Web Standards Project site (http://webstandards.org/learn/askw3c/dec2002.html).