The meta section of HTML documents can contain a keyword section.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<meta name="description" content="under construction" />
<meta name="keywords"
content="..." />
Can one use unicode characters in this section (i.e., \u00B0)? If yes how?
All the characters you put into an HTML document, whether in attribute values or elsewhere, as Unicode characters. If the character encoding of your document is UTF-8, as your example declares (but it had better be UTF-8 encoded then!), you can enter any characters, such as the degree sign (°), directly there. How you do that depends on your authoring environment. You can alternatively use a character reference (like °) or, for some characters, an entity reference (like °).
But \u00B0 is not an HTML notation. It just a sequence of six characters. It has a special meaning in JavaScript, but not in HTML. The corresponding HTML notation is °.
Search engines will probably ignore special characters like the degree sign in keywords. But not necessarily; Google has been observed to be sensitive to them in some special situations. (Not for the degree sign at the moment, it seems.)
In <meta name=description ...> tags, special characters may be relevant if search engines use their content when constructing the page description for search result lists. Such things still happen, though less frequently than they used to.
Because non-English websites that use Unicode for their body content will also use Unicode for their metadata, it is reasonable to assume that the important tools that process HTML metadata will be able to cope with this in UTF-8.
Also bear in mind that (at least historically) the keywords meta tag was meant to contain terms that people might search for. Your example \00B0 is the degrees sign; in this case it seems more likely people will search for the word degrees than for the symbol °. Because of wide-scale abuse of keyword metadata, many search engines (including Google) ignore them for search ranking.
So, in summary, I think it is safe to use Unicode keyword metadata. But it probably won't improve your site's search ranking for those terms.
Related
Rookie question.
Would guys recommend using Html ASCII or does the browser handle this part? I was reading through W3Schools and I’m just curious if this is something I should always consider as a good habit.
It's always a good idea to include <meta charset="UTF-8"> in the <head> of your HTML documents. This lets the browser know that your document is encoded with Unicode.
It's perfectly fine to use Unicode characters in an HTML document, but it's better to use HTML entity names or entity numbers.
(see a list of entity names and numbers and learn more on
w3schools.)
According to w3schools,
If you use an HTML entity name or a hexadecimal number,
the character will always display correctly.
This is independent of what character set (encoding) your page uses!
This means that entity names and numbers are guaranteed to work, even if you don't put <meta charset="UTF-8"> in the <head> of the document.
I am trying to fetch the swedish content from another site. I am able to fetch the data but the Swedish characters(ÅÖÄ) are missing. Swedish Content that I have added directly has no issue to display as i have added the meta-tag. The issue is when i am trying to display the data from another site. Is it possible to fix this issue. I do not have any access to other site.
To take into account Swedish characters, you need to set the charset to UTF-8. An example from MDN is:
<!-- In HTML5 -->
<meta charset="utf-8">
<!-- Defining the charset in HTML4 -->
<!-- Note: This is invalid in HTML5 -->
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
The meta tag goes in the <head> tag like so:
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
</head>
</html>
To quote from MDN:
[charset] declares the character encoding used of the page. It can be locally overridden using the lang attribute on any element. This
attribute is a literal string and must be one of the preferred MIME
names for a character encoding as defined by the IANA. Though the
standard doesn't request a specific character encoding, it gives some
recommendations:
Authors are encouraged to use UTF-8.
Authors should not use ASCII-incompatible encodings (i.e. those that don't map the 8-bit code points 0x20 to 0x7E to the Unicode
0x0020 to 0x007E code points) as these represent a security risk:
browsers not supporting them may interpret benign content as HTML
Elements. This is the case of at least the following charsets:
JIS_C6226-1983, JIS_X0212-1990, HZ-GB-2312, JOHAB, the ISO-2022
family, and the EBCDIC family.
Authors must not use CESU-8, UTF-7, BOCU-1 and SCSU, also falling in that category and not intended to be used on the web.
Cross-scripting attacks with some of these encodings have been
documented.
Authors should not use UTF-32 because not all HTML5 encoding algorithms can distinguish it from UTF-16.
Here is also a link on UTF-8.
*Note: if for some reason UTF-8 encoding is not working for your characters, try charset="ISO-8859-1"
I want to display an "a" in html with bar over it..as in ā. Like I want to write āyush.
I also used overline but that makes it ugly.
Pasting the characted in html gives a-.
In html it is ā (lowercase) or Ā (uppercase).
Replace it with ā
See an example here
Make sure you set your charset in the head of the document.
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
You haven't given us enough info to be certain, but this is likely to be an encoding issue. I would guess that the character set you're sending the page in is probably just the default and doesn't include any extended characters.
You need to serve the page as UTF-8.
Add this to your <head> block:
<meta charset="utf-8">
that should be sufficient to fix it.
If you can't change the character set for whatever reason, you could send the character as a HTML entity -- find out the numeric entity code for it and use the &#xxx; notation (where xxx is the character code you require).
You have two main options: use character references like &x#101;, or insert the character “ā” using a tool that does not munge it. In the former case, you need not worry about character encodings, but some other characters may have similar issues without your noticing it. In the latter case, you need to make sure that the character encoding is properly set; see the W3C document Character encodings. Note that setting a meta tag may or may not be sufficient, depending on server.
Either way, there can be font problems. For example, a browser might pick up a glyph for “ā” from a font that is very different from the one used for “a”, causing typographic mess. To avoid this, use a font-family list containing a good selection of fonts containing all the characters you need. More info: Guide to using special characters in HTML.
I found a website that contains the string "don’t". The obvious intent was the word "don't". I looked at the source expecting to see some character references, but didn't (it just shows the literal string "don’t". A Google search yielded nothing (expect lots of other sites that have the same problem!). Can anyone explain what's happening here?
Edit: Here's the meta tag that was used:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
Would this not cause the page to be served up as Latin-1 in the HTTP header?
In your browser, switch the page encoding to "UTF-8". You're seeing a right single quote character, which is encoded by the octets 0xE2 0x80 0x99 in UTF-8. In your charset, windows-1252, those 3 octets render as "’". The page should be explicitly specifying UTF-8 as its charset either in the HTTP headers or in an HTML <meta> tag, but it probably isn't.
According to Character encondings in HTML a lemme in wikipedia:
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) has
been in use since 1991, but HTML 4.0
(December 1997) was the first
standardized version where
international characters were given
reasonably complete treatment. When an
HTML document includes special
characters outside the range of
seven-bit ASCII two goals are worth
considering: the information's
integrity, and universal browser
display.
I suppose the site you checked, isn't impelemented with this in mind.
This has all got to do with encoding. Take a look back at the source, is there a tag at the top specifying it (charset)? My guess is it'll be UTF8 - although it could be something completely different.
This thread explains all. A combination of using a weird UTF-8 apostrophe character (probably originating from a Word Document), on a server that probably reports its encoding as non-UTF-8, despite the page having UTF characters (and possible even correctly reporting its own encoding).
When writing an HTML document, is it acceptable to use the direct special character such as the captial letter C with a cedilla underneath as regular text: Ç or to use the HTML Entity name of this charecter, Ç ?
I have seen both being used in practice, but surely there are rules governing the appropriate usage of this, as well as advantages to one way over another. For instance, this website maintains the raw-form of this character, but other websites may end up rendering it as a square block.
Real characters:
Are easier to type if your system is set up for a language that uses those characters
Produce more readable code
Save bytes
HTML entities:
Let you more or less forget about character encoding
Obviously, characters with special meaning in HTML (<, &, etc) still need to be represented by entities.
If you're using UTF-8 character encoding, then most entity characters (other than &, > and <) become redundant.
If you're not using UTF-8, then you need entities for everything.
It all depends on the character encoding of the document. If you're unsure of whether or not you should use the the regular text or the encoding version, you could run your page through the W3C Validator.
Consider this code:
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Stuff</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>©</p>
<p>©</p>
</body>
</html>
The document encoding is set to UTF-8 and when it's validated, it returns an error:
Sorry, I am unable to validate this document because on line 7 it contained one or more bytes that I cannot interpret as utf-8 (in other words, the bytes found are not valid values in the specified Character Encoding). Please check both the content of the file and the character encoding indication.