HTML5 Char Set

HTML & CSS
1

I’ve got a site that I’m trying to optimise for Google Page Speed.

There’s a couple of issues that are still outstanding; one telling me I need to Specify a Character Set

I’ve tried with two separate Char Sets:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; UTF-8" />

and

<meta charset="UTF-8" />

…with neither passing Page Speed check.

What am I doing wrong? What is the correct Char Set for an HTML5 page?

2

Do you administer the server this is on? If not, try to add this to .htaccess:

AddDefaultCharset Off
AddCharset ISO-8859-1 .html
AddCharset ISO-8859-1 .htm
AddCharset UTF-8 .xml

If you’re serving as XHTML 1.0 you officially must specify the charset in the headers.

3

So if I add the above code to the .htaccess file I don’t have to specify a charset in the header?

4

It won’t hurt to specify it (the same) in both, but no, if you add the above then it should be in the headers, which is XHTML 1.0 compliant.

5

Spot on - cheers mate. I’ll give that a go tonight.

6

When you say “it doesn’t pass”, what does that mean? You don’t need the closing slash in HTML5. This shoud be fine:

<meta charset="utf-8">
7

I mean the google page speed checker picks up I haven’t specified a Character Set - although I thought I had.

Really? I have closing / in all my metas and the page passes the html5 validation.

8

Yes, either is OK in HTML5. But personally, I think it looks messy. :slight_smile: