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.