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Charset specified in a meta tag

The following resources have a character set specified in a meta tag. Specifying a character set in a meta tag disables the lookahead downloader in IE8. To improve resource download parallelization, move the character set to the HTTP Content-Type response header.

I am using the following code: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

How do I move this to my server or place it in response header.

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Big Monty

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SOLUTION

Ray Paseur

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livewirewebsolutions

ASKER

Hi Ray,

but I heard you are supposed to avoid a charset in the meta tag?

Ray Paseur

These are the first 3 lines from Facebook (so it can't be that big an issue)

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en" id="facebook" class="no_js">
<head><meta charset="utf-8" />

Open in new window

The issue that some have been critical of has been the placement of a character-set tag deep into the document. In theory, UTF-8 is self-evident, but many browsers will re-request the document if they encounter a character-set tag to be sure they are using the right encoding. I think any associated performance issues are very, very small, perhaps unmeasurable.

livewirewebsolutions

ASKER

What about using it in the htaccess file?

Ray Paseur

I don't see anything wrong with that. The central issue is consistency across all encoding of the data. You may find a global default character set configuration for the HTTP server, which in theory could be (slightly) more efficient than .htaccess settings.

Here is what W3 has to say: "...information in the HTTP header overrides information in the document itself."
http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-htaccess-charset.en

If you wanted to serve some pages in UTF-8 and some in ISO-8559-1, you would probably not want to use .htaccess, but if you know you're only working with one encoding you'll be OK either way.

Dave Baldwin

I have seen a couple of questions where the server was sending a UTF-8 content type header that was totally confusing the user. There is an awful lot of content that is in ISO-8859-x character set. Changing the character set directive does Not change the actual character codes so you end up with a page that has question marks usually in black diamonds where the browser doesn't know what to show for that code. One of those places is the Apache web server docs.