How to deal with HTML-entities for publishing multilingual content

Question

In case of publishing any text online as a HTML page – I face the problem of the correct reflection of symbols of several languages which require extended Latin character encoding. In this case I’m searching the Entity (hex) from the list on this site http://theorem.ca/~mvcorks/code/charsets/auto.html . I wonder If it’s possible to save my time via definition of any meta-tags and their attributes.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks. Vitaly Repin

Answer 1

I recommend you to use the Unicode charset and encode the characters with UTF-8.

Unicode contains probably all characters you’ll need and UTF-8 is the most efficient encoding for the Unicode charset concerning the code word lengths. If you’re using UTF-8, you don’t need the HTML character references as you can use the character they represent themselves.

Just write your text with the plain characters, tell your editor to save it using UTF-8 as character encoding, and tell your web server to serve the document with UTF-8.