AssPirate

1. Encode and serve your pages as Unicode
If you are planning on localizing your site into different languages than the best encoding you should choose for your web pages is Unicode. Unicode is a kind of numeric presentation of characters that is two bytes and so can contain up to 65535 characters to show. There are no currently spoken languages that have more than 65,535 characters, so by using Unicode as your codepage you should not run into problems with characters not displaying. To represent your web page as a Unicode page, specify the character set as UTF-8 rather than the default encoding, add the line of code below, in the head part of your page:

<meta HTTP-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

Another benefit of using unicode to build your pages is that it uniquely allows you to display multiple character sets on the one page. This is of most benefit for pages where you wish to display more than one language e.g. introductory splash pages, language content lists etc. You will also need to ensure your web server is setup to send the page as Unicode to the browser. If you are using the Apache webserver you can do this by editing the .htaccess file and making sure that the AddDefaultCharset Directive is set as:

AddDefaultCharset utf-8

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