html encoding for special characters

  • Hello! My blog is in French, and I want all the text encoded in html code for special characters, for this is the best way to make them readable for everyone in the world. Forget about iso-8899-15 (something like that), Unicode, etc. Just use the html encoding: & eacute ; (without the spaces) is ??, & ccedil ; is ?§, and so on. Almost anybody in the world will read this right.

    Now, I would like world press to do this automatically. If I or a visitor of my blog types ?§, I would like WordPress to record it as & cedil ; (without the spaces of course). So the french characters would be readable from any modern computer, regardless of the language of the browser, desktop, and so.

    Is it possible to encode everything in html codes?

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • Yes, but probably a bit complicated.

    Much easier is to have your blog in utf-8 (unicode) and write the articles as such, then the special characters will also show up right everywhere.

    Thread Starter ludwin

    (@ludwin)

    Yngwin, thanks for your reply.
    Unicode is not yet the default encoding on every computer. It might be the encoding format of the future, but nowadays, I find that html encoding is safer…

    If I chose unicode, my browser must be set to read unicode, if I uses latin-9, the result will be horrific. I must therefore warn my readers: chose unicode encoding…

    The advantage of using html encoding is that it will be read correctly no matter which encoding system has been chosen in the browser.

    If you have a “declaration” for the correct encoding (like <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />), browsers should automatically change to using it. Right? Are there situations when it isn’t so? (Can a user set a fixed encoding?!) Do some browsers ignore it? I’m just asking out of curiosity…

    Indeed Minna, if the document is sent the right headers, saying that the document is utf-8 (even more important than the meta-tag, although that helps for off-line reading of the document) the browser should automatically use that encoding. The reader can change that, but that takes effort.

    Thread Starter ludwin

    (@ludwin)

    Minna, some browsers offer the option to let the user choose to always use a given set of encoding, background and font color, font fact, etc, but it is not recommended to use that option, except in given cases.

    As far as I know, html encoding is the surest way to always get the result you want. But if the header says utf-8, and you actually type in utf-8 characters, this should be enough, for it works in most cases.

    I worry about the encoding because I write in French living in South-East Asia, editing my blog using cybercoffees. This is an extreme case. In some cybercoffees, my blog looks bizarre if I don’t use html encoding.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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