I would like to understand this better. I read Item 22 on
Peter's site.
In all of my html output files RH inserted this line:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;
charset=utf-8">
As I understand it, the browser uses this flag.
Somewhere -- I think it was during installation of RH 7 -- I
had the option to select either the Windows or UTF character set. I
selected UTF.
I can't find that setting now, but the meta line appears
without any help for me.
Q 1: Where is/was that option?
Q 2: Is there yet another piece to the puzzle, mentioned in
this paragraph?
"Set the 3 bytes UTF-8 BOM (byte-order mark) at the very
beginning of the file to tell any kind of text file editor that it
is UTF-8 encoded file. These 3 bytes are invisible characters so
you won't see them in any editor. These are optional bytes and
browsers don’t require them to render a UTF-8 encoded HTML
file."
Elaborating, the article says some servers (e.g., Novell)
need the 3-byte BOM flag or will not interpret the file as UTF-8,
despite the META statement.
Q 3: Does this mean we need RH to do something more than
inserting the META statement?
Q 4: Is this also essential for getting servers and/or
browsers to display certain characters in languages other than
English?
Q 5: Is this also relevant to Linux servers, whether for
English or other languages?
I found some enlightenment here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_Order_Mark
Right now I'm not affected by this. But I'm trying to figure
out what to look for in the future.
Thanks for any help.
Harvey