Goal
- Use an international character set.
- Prevent display faults.
- Simplify content manipulation by users and developers.
Implementation
Configure the server and databases to use UTF-8.
Choose tools (development software, frameworks, CMS, content production tools) compatible with UTF-8.
Control
This verification is carried out in three stages. For each page checked:
- Check the character set given by the HTTP content-type header sent by the server, using a dedicated tool.
- Check, if necessary, for compliance of this meta element header http-equiv="Content-Type" in the HTML code of the pages.
- Check that the content of the pages is encoded in UTF-8 (with no unexpected or erroneous characters), for example by submitting the page for HTML validation with the W3C validator (validator.w3.org).
The W3C Internationalization Checker tool (validator.w3.org/i18n-checker/) combines these three steps.
Business application and benefits
The rules should be applied to your projects from the design phase through to post-implementation , and they should be understood by all professionals with web and customer experience (CX) responsibilities: from strategy to operations, marketers to project managers, and editorial to technical staff. The benefits of using this ruleset are numerous, including improving customer satisfaction, web performance, and e-commerce, and expanding your client base, while also decreasing your errors and costs.
The objective of these rules and the Opquast community mission is ‘making the web better’ for your customers and for everyone! Opquast rules cover the key major areas of risk that can negatively affect website users such as privacy, ecodesign, accessibility and security.
Opquast training has already allowed over 11,000 web professionals to have their skills certified. Train your teams or your students, contact us