Character Sets and Language Codes by Don Pedro

Character Tags

The characters tag for most European languages looks like this:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
There is a new recommendation to use "ISO-2022-JP" instead of "ISO-8859-1", but I haven't seen anybody using that yet (Aug. 2006).

The "charset" tags for HTML 4.0, XML, and XHTML are a little bit different:

HTML 4.0 use <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
XML use at start of a document or an entity: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>. XML creates documents, not web pages and is therefore used very much to make web pages available on more than just the Web (Internet). You must therefore include display instructions for the browser (.css or HTML 4.0) to make a web page with XML.
XHTML use <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/> Note the end slash (/).

The Unicode character sets (utf) should make HTML browsers and (XML) processors behave as if they used Unicode internally without transferring documents in Unicode. Info on character set codes: Unicode Consortium

Special Characters for Different Languages

Some languages, especially East European, have their own alphabets with very special accented characters. These require special HTML codes (ASCII - ascii) to display correctly. All browsers do not recognize every code, you need to check in those browsers your visitors are using (you need "Visitor Statistics").

Whenever possible use the "Friendly code". See list below:

Česky/Slovník ( Czech, Slovak )
François ( French )
Deutsch ( German )
Połski ( Polish )

Pycckий ( Russian ). See note
Español ( Spanish )
Turkish. See note below.

When you use any of the "numbered codes", remember these are always of same format, i.e. { - sometimes you must add the numbers sign (#) yourself.

Please note: Russian and Turkish characters are part of the Unicode characters. You need to declare this in the <HEAD> section of your webpage:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
Don't copy this, type it exactly as it is.

Example: If you, for instance, write the German name "Jürgen" without the special code, i.e. like Jurgen, it's not the same name anymore. I don't think you yourself would be happy if someone wrote and misspelled your own name. Would you?

Symbol Codes

When you want to display symbols, also used in the HTML code, it's recommended you use "HTML equivalent" code - and when these are not enough, then you use the numbers from the ISO standards list. See below in list of special characters.

< < (less than)
> > (more than)
" " (quotation mark)
& & (and)
# # (number sign)

<< « (left angle quote)
>> » (right angle quote
= = (equals)
/ / (forward slash)
\ \ (back slash)

When you use several text specifying tags together, the sequence is the same as in many Asian languages - i.e. you go from less specific to more specific.
Example: "house, big, yellow" or in Computerese: HELLO ! which gives: HELLO ! Note the end tags are always in opposite order.
B = Bold
U = Underlined
Font = Character

The code is always in English with American spelling (i.e. "color" = American spelling, "colour" = British spelling). The #-sign indicates to the browser to use the hexadecimal code for that colour. You can, of course, write the colour name, but it's not recommended.

Language Tags

The language tag looks like this: <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en">
"en" is for English. If you use one or several full sentences in an other language, mixed with English, then it's better to include that language. For instance, if both English and German your language tag should be: content="en,de">, where "de" is the code for German. See list of language codes.

There is a new recommendation from W3C to specify a primary language in the meta tags and then specifying the secondary language / languages in the text where you are using it/them. If you are using XML, XHTML, or CSS you can get more specific details on how to do.

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If you use only one or a few words from a different language, then you can keep both language and character tags for English. But instead of, for instance, the letter "ö" (Swedish, Finnish, German) you use the HTML equivalent code from the special characters list - (i.e.: ö = ö).

In such a case you surround the "foreign" words with the "span"-tag with the language code to indicate to the search engines you are using a different language and that it's not a spelling error. Example:
En la Español
Alternately you can use the <div> tag instead of the tag.

In the code you use ñ instead of "ñ". (See list of special characters) That way you avoid getting the search engines "think" you have misspelled some words. Furthermore many search engines keep country and/or language specific data banks. When you specify the language for the foreign words you use, your webpage will be included in those special directories also.