Re: Meta Tags

by =?iso-8859-4?B?TGF1cmkgVuRpbg==?= <optima(at)hot.ee>

Date:	Thu, 31 Aug 2000 13:52:14 +0300
To:	"Susan Kemp" <SusanKemp(at)earthlink.net>
Cc:	<hwg-basics(at)hwg.org>
References:	canopy computer
	todo: View Thread, Original

Susan,

> <META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">

Do you want that your site is accessible with as many browsers/platforms as
possible? If this is the case then never use the charser "windows-1252" nor any
other charset containing the word 'windows'. I had a couple of sites with the
meta tag like yours(back then I still used Frontpage to create my pages).
Everything was fine when viewing with IE and Netscape on Windows.
Then one day I had the chance to view the site on RedHat Linux 6.02. All of my
"highly informative" text looked like the following:
??? ????? ????????? ????? ?? ????? ???? ??????? ????? ??? ???? ???????? ????
????? ??? ???? ?? ???

I tested it on other similar systems and on each system all letters were turned
into question marks. Everything looked OK with Windows but not Linux. I figured
that visitors wouldn't like to see several thousands of question marks so I
haven't used the charset "windows-1252" on my web pages again.
Instead I use ISO standard charsets. You should too. You don't have anything to
lose and you may have a lot to gain(the Linux market share is growing pretty
fast)!


Just for your information.

Yours sincerely,
Lauri V�in

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