Article for review: Character encodings in HTML and CSS

Comments are being sought on this article prior to final release. Please send any comments to www-international@w3.org (subscribe). We expect to publish a final version in one to two weeks.

This is an update, in a temporary location, of the tutorial Character sets & encodings in XHTML, HTML and CSS. (Please be careful about bookmarking the location, since it is only temporary.)

A lot of new material was added, eg. related to the UTF-8 BOM, normalization, etc., and the material was rearranged significantly. The rearrangement was to downplay slightly the XHTML 1.0 issues, given that that is now only relevant to IE6, but also to help readers more quickly find information they need for the format they are dealing with.

The explicit distinction between XHTML 1.0 and XHTML 1.1 with regard to MIME types was removed, since the XHTML2 WG is hopefully very close to issuing a PER that enables XHTML 1.1 to be served as text/html.

The update adds information about HTML5.

Where a section corresponds to an article that has been updated, those updates were also migrated to this document.