Effects of Non-ASCII Characters in HTML vs HTML Encoded Characters

0
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I had an issue earlier today where someone couldn't compile a static site due to some non-ASCII characters in a kramdown file. While writing a small script that finds these characters in our content, I ran across a large number of non-HTML encoded special characters.

What are the implications in including these characters directly in the HTML? Take the © character.

If I include the character directly in HTML, it seems to render correctly in my browser. That being said, I don't know the side-effects for those who don't have fonts installed that support these characters.

What are the side effects of leaving these non-ASCII characters in the HTML? I know in some situations it can lead to strange (?) characters showing up, but I'd like more specific information on how these special characters get rendered.

If I HTML encode these special characters and a client doesn't have a font that supports them, does it show the same (?) character? Is there any meaningful difference between using the HTML-encoded vs non encoded characters?usign

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htmlutf-8fontscharacter-encodingnon-ascii-characters

1 Answers

2
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Is there any meaningful difference between using the HTML-encoded vs non encoded characters?

Not in terms of the browser being able to display them in general. If you want to use these as you call them "non-standard" characters (which are very much standard characters, just not ASCII characters), you should specify an encoding, preferably utf-8. The HTML5 way of doing this (which is backwards compatible and supported by pretty much all browsers) is

<meta charset="utf-8">

That said, some tools compiling static HTML from markdown etc. might have problems with it, but that depends on the tool. You're safer using the entities like &copy; there; which you can also always use without specifying an encoding.

This is not the full story, as the way a browser is decoding a file can also be influenced by other factors, like HTTP Response Headers. Also, even if you omit it, as you could observe, browsers do everything they can to still parse it correctly, there's just no guarantee.