HTML-使用UTF-8或ISO-8859-1时，我仍然需要键入特殊字符的代码吗？

Question

It is as the title says:

HTML - When using UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1 do I still need to type the codes for the special characters?

Or can I just type them normally?

Ex: I'm using UTF-8 in my HTML META tag. I need to type ç should I just type it or type its code which is ç

I know this is a trivial question, but it's fundamental so I just can't skip it.

Answer 1

No, you only need to use a character reference if:

• The character you want cannot be represented in the character encoding you are using or
• The character has some special meaning in HTML (such as < or & ).

Note that declaring you are using UTF-8 in the meta tag is insufficient. You also have to encode the HTML source in UTF-8 (good editors will default to this) and not override it with a declaration of some other encoding in the real HTTP headers. You should also set the real HTTP headers to state that UTF-8 is being used.

Answer 2

Yes, you can include those characters directly in your HTML source, without using the entity for the character. Just make sure that the encoding you are saving the file in really does match what the web server serves it in.

The part about ensuring that the encoding is correct is important, and easy to get wrong. One thing to note is that the meta tag is not the primary source of information that the browser uses for interpreting the encoding of the document. The primary source of information is the Content-type header, sent as part of the HTTP headers. The meta tag was originally supposed to be used to communicate to the web server what Content-type to use, but most web servers use configuration separate from the document itself for this. So if you are saving your document as UTF-8, make sure that the web server is configured to serve pages as UTF-8 as well.

The meta tag is used by browsers as a fallback if the Content-type header is not provided or does not include valid encoding information. It is useful to have if you are ever going to be loading from a source that doesn't provide Content-type information, like using a file: URL to view the page on your local machine.

So, there are 3 places you should make sure your encoding is set up properly; in your text editor (so that it saves the file with the appropriate encoding), in your web server configuration (so that it communicates the appropriate encoding to the browser), and in the meta tag, so that when you view the page locally, it is displayed with the correct encoding.

Finally, you shouldn't use ISO-8859-1. That's a legacy encoding, only still supported for compatibility. Every major browser and text editor supports UTF-8 by now, which covers all of Unicode, and provides a lot fewer encoding headaches.