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Adobe Web Tech Curriculum

Unit 7: Page Management

Lesson 7.1: Page Head Section

Encoding Type and Character Set

Importance of Encoding Type and Character Set
Changing the Encoding Type and Character Set

Importance of Encoding Type and Character Set

The encoding type identifies the character set used by the document. The character set used for a web document has implications for the overall universality of the site. As you know, not all languages utilize the same characters in their written language. As a result, there are character sets for various languages, such as Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, etc.

The default character set used by GoLive is the traditional set for Western Europe and Latin America language (ISO-8859-1). The sample code below shows the use of the ISO-8859-1 character set in the default XHTML code generated by GoLive; notice that there are two references to it:

In the XML declaration: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
In the head section: <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1 > <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" /> <meta name="generator" content="Adobe GoLive" /> <title>Untitled Page</title> </head>

Although the default character set used by GoLive is ISO-8859-1, the W3C recommends the use of the Unicode standard. According to a technical report available via the W3C and Unicode Inc.,

The Unicode Standard [Unicode] defines the universal character set. Its primary goal is to provide an unambiguous encoding of the content of plain text, ultimately covering all languages in the world. Currently in its fourth major version, Unicode contains a large number of characters covering most of the currently used scripts in the world.
~ W3C's Unicode in XML and Other Markup Languages (http://www.w3.org/TR/unicode-xml/)

Changing the Encoding Type and Character Set

To change the encoding type and character set, follow these steps:

Click the Encoding icon reference in the Head Section of the Document Window.
Click the radio button associated with the desired character set from the Encoding Inspector.

Additional Information

The encoding type and character set can also be changed via the File menu, by following these steps:
File > Document Encoding > select desired encoding type

The following code is generated when the encoding type and character set is set to UTF-8 (UTF stands for Unicode Transformation Format).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" /> <meta name="generator" content="Adobe GoLive" /> <title>Untitled Page</title> </head>

It's
time!

Practice Activity 7.1-A

For this activity, you will change the default encoding and character set for the pages within your "practice" site.

Open your "practice" GoLive site created in the Creating a GoLive Site section of the GoLive Basics lesson.
1. Open the GoLive Application.
2. Open the "practice" site.
Change the default encoding and character set for the pages in the "practice" site to the UTF-8 character set.
1. Open one page in the site.
2. Click the Encode tag reference in the Head Section of the Document Window.
3. Click the UTF-8 radio button.
In similar fashion, change the character set for each of the remaining files in the "practice" folder.

7.1.1: Individual Assignment

For this activity, you will change the default encoding and character set for the pages within "Gage_Guitars" site.

Open "Gage_Guitars" GoLive site:
1. Open the GoLive Application.
2. Open the "Gage_Guitars" site.
Change the default encoding and character set for the index.html file in the "Gage_Guitars" site to the UTF-8 character set:
1. Open the index.html page in the "Gage_Guitars" site.
2. Click the <ENC> tag reference in the Head Section of the Document Window.
3. Click the UTF-8 radio button.
In similar fashion, change the character set for the guitars.html, concerts.html, and lessons.html pages of the "Gage_Guitars" folder.