Character Encoding
A webpage can contain any number of different languages. The character encoding of a site specifies how those languages are stored on your Host. The choice of encoding is a trade-off between the support of unusual characters and the size of the HTML.
Sandvox offers four different choices of character encoding:
- US-ASCII
- Only handles basic letters from the Roman alphabet. For example, it cannot handle characters with accents. In order to handle any characters not supported by ASCII, Sandvox must convert them into a special numeric code that takes up a lot of space. Therefore, this choice is only really suitable for English sites.
- ISO-8859-1 / Latin 1
- Similar to ASCII but with better support for accents. Will handle most European languages efficiently.
- UTF-8 (Recommended)
- The recommended choice for most sites. It supports all characters without taking up much space.
- UTF-16
- Requires more space than UTF-8. However, it is more efficient at handling languages like Japanese, so if your site is in such a language, UTF-16 is generally the best choice.
To set a site's Character Encoding:
- Open the Site Inspector.
- Go to the Properties tab.
- Set the Character Encoding from the "Character encoding" popup.
Host Setup
While using the Host Setup Assistant to prepare a site for publishing, Sandvox checks the Host used to see if it always serves pages using a particular character encoding. If this is the case then your site's encoding should match that of the Host.
If Sandvox finds that your site has a different character encoding than the Host it will alert you with a sheet warning of the situation. We recommend you follow the instructions and set the character encoding in the Site Inspector to match.
