On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 4:16 PM, Kristine Cummins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Can someone tell me how to fix this W3C warning – I'm new to understanding > this part. > <http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.beverlywilson.com%2F>
Kristine, If your server is already specifying the character set (a.k.a. encoding) then you don't need to do so in your HTML. In fact, I'd recommend against doing so, and the problem you've experienced is exactly why. If you specify the encoding in two (or more) places, they can get out of synch. You might *think* you're specifying ISO-8859-1 because that's what your HTML META tag says, but if the server says something else, that's what takes priority. It's important to understand that the encoding tells browsers (and other user agents, like Googlebot) how to interpret non-ASCII characters in your page. It's a common mistake to think that these are restricted to accented characters that we generally don't use in English, but content pasted in from Microsoft Word (for instance) is likely to contain non-ASCII as well. In other words, you might be using them without realizing it. If you are, and you get the encoding wrong, then what you see as quote marks (for instance) might look like this to others: †Whatever tool you're using to save files should give you a choice of which encoding/character set to use. You can use ISO-8859-1 to write in English and most Western European languages. Since your Web server is already identifying your pages as such, it might be a good choice. Others have suggested UTF-8 which can represent anything under the sun. That's great, but you'll have to find some way to cajole your server into telling the world that your pages are UTF-8, not ISO-8859-1. If you can't, you'll have to stick to the latter. -- Philip http://NikitaTheSpider.com/ Whole-site HTML validation, link checking and more ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
