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Answer 1

+5 A:

There are two issues at work here.

Language
Character encoding

Language

The Content-Language HTTP header describes the natural language of the intended audience. This may not be the same as the language the document is actually written in. Use the lang attribute to describe that.

Character encoding

This allows you to represent the letters that you wish to use. You need to make sure that your text really does use the selected encoding and that the browser is informed that that is the encoding you are using.

Select a character encoding (UTF-8 is generally the best choice, it covers just about every character you could possibly want to use and saves you having to switch encodings for different languages), see http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/tutorial-char-enc/
Ensure your editor saves using that encoding
Ensure your server specifies that it is using that encoding
Ensure that nothing mangles the encoding between the editor and server (such as by being inserted into a database that is configured to use a different encoding)

HTTP headers

NB: Your question mentions <meta http-equiv>. Real HTTP headers are the better place to specify this information, and they will override whatever your document claims. Make sure your server is configured correctly.

XHTML

XHTML complicates matters…

Use xml:lang in addition to lang
Don't use anything except UTF-8. If you do, then you must specify this in the XML declaration (and adding an XML declaration will trigger Quirks mode in some browsers).

David Dorward 2009-10-09 11:17:10

@David. My content negotiating website might, under certain conditions, violate your last XHTML point. Can you explain why the XML declaration is necessary here, and the HTTP header is insufficient? Is it just for non-browser XML processors?

Alohci 2009-10-11 09:49:51

If you don't use UTF-8 (or UTF-16) then the specification requires it. The XML may be saved and accessed from a local data store. Somebody trying to debug the page may look at the source and assume UTF-8/16.

David Dorward 2009-10-11 21:03:02

OK, thanks. Both the XML and XHTML specs allow the character encoding to be specified by "a higher level" protocol, so the only difference for XHTML here is that the meta http-equiv can't be used to establish the character encoding, because it's neither XML nor a higher level protocol. Right? So long as I don't need to support store-and-inspect I should be OK, I think.

Alohci 2009-10-12 00:00:16

Answer 2

+4 A:

When you save the file you have to make sure that it's created with the same encoding that you have specified in the meta tag.

I recommend that you use utf-8 instead of iso-8859-2. The unicode character set supports all characters in practically every language that exists (and even some that don't...).

Guffa 2009-10-09 11:17:35

If I use UTF-8 encoding, it works. But won't it work with iso-8859-2 which is a character encoding made especially for central European languages?

Richard Knop 2009-10-09 11:23:26

@Richard: If your computer is using that character set natively, you could save the file as ANSI, and it would work. You could also use HTML entities for the character codes for all non-ASCII characters, like ö for the ö character.

Guffa 2009-10-09 11:31:15

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