Hi Dejan,
You wrote:
I'm not really sure, as the Notepad I got with Win98 doesn't offer anything but 'text file' and 'all files'
Hmm. I didn't think about different versions of Windows. On my Windows XP, "text file" and "all files" are the choices for "Save as type:" and the chance to select the "Encoding:" is next below that. (The bottom of the "Save As..." dialog box is partly off screen at the bottom until I drag it up a bit.)
... save the page as utf-8, open it in Mozilla/Firefox and check the very first characters displayed. If there is no strange character there you know it's OK.
I have heard of this but also read (somewhere) that later browsers from IE6 on have been "fixed" to not display characters from trying to show the BOM; as a result I thought nothing of the fact that I have not seen such a result in IE6 and Mozilla 1.7.
> Is saving a file as UTF-8 compatible with the > iso-8859-1 meta tag?
I'm not sure why would you want to do this,
No reason, except that answers given on [WSG] concerning the meta tag often show iso-8859-1 and this thread on file encoding is aimed to UTF-8. I strongly suspected that both the meta declaration and the file encoding should agree.
... some reasoning on general principles. As long as the file is saved as uft-8 it contains the correctly encoded content and it's up to the browser to display it accordingly. Now, the primary source of encoding declaration for the browser is the HTTP header sent by the server along the document (this is the .htaccess stuff I mentioned), which should override every other directive, including the meta declaration.
All of my efforts, so far, are stand-alone and intranet applications, so I don't know what to expect from actually having the file on a true server situation accessed from the Internet. Obviously, the fact that what I have been doing works locally does not mean everything is OK as to standards compliance.
Thus, the browser should choose the correct encoding and display both the english and the vietnamese text. ... in for unexpected results here: if the browser ignores the rule and chooses to believe the meta directive instead of the header, it would display correctly the english part, but the vietnamese one would be a sequence of empty squares, question marks and/or best-guess ISO-8859-1 characters ...
Urk! Fortunately, my files are English-language with a few &#... codes for "proper" typographic punctuation and some characters in names coming from foreign languages, all typed on a US English keyboard. Nevertheless I assume my not complying with standards would, sooner or later, lead to some hard-to-untangle problems.
More, if somebody saves that page to the disk and looks at it later, the only source of encoding information would be the meta stuff, ...
Well, provided the browser doesn't cover up the problem as it does part of the time! LOL.
My thanks to all who have contributed to my angle on this thread--the "how to" of getting the files right seems to have very little in the line of resources, unless, as I suggested, I just don't search the right terms.
Regards,
Gene Falck [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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