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.
