JuliÃn Landerreche wrote:
1) Question: Is there a way to use special characters directly in the code?
Two ways, actually, both requiring the pages being displayed as utf-8. One is writing the document with an editor capable of saving text as utf-8 (Unired is the one I like - http://www.esperanto.mv.ru/UniRed/ENG/), so that anything you can key or paste in it will be stored correctly and rendered as expected, as long as you remember to put a <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> in your page's head. The other one is using a browser's form to input the text and send it to some sort of CMS. Provided the page with the form is utf-8 too, all modern browsers will convert the whole stuff to utf-8 while uploading.
2) I have seen a lot of webpages that directly use the special character and dont code them as html entities. This pages are displayed correctly. Question: Is this a good or bad practice (to use special characters in code, instead of entities)?
According to my experience, it is OK to do it using Unicode, otherwise you're relying on unwarranted assumptions regarding the native codepage of the reader's machine (example: if you use an à in your source it will probably be displayed as such on any Spanish and generally western language OS, but it will become a Ä on most Central European PCs).
3. In Google results, I found that those special characters arent always correctly displayed.
Google uses utf-8 for display, so your browser renders the title as if it was encoded as such.
Question: Is there a way to force or override the encoding (not the charset) directly from the page code?
I think that my textpattern managed pages should have ISO-8850-1 encoding.
You can try using the numeric character references (written as &#xxx, where xxx is the decimal value of the character) or the hexadecimal ones (written as ꪪ, where AAAA is the hex value of the same). The complete list of references is at ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/.
3. If I change to UTF-8... wich are the advantages / disvantages?
The main advantages are correct rendering in all modern browsers - OSes, plus the possibility of hassle-free mixing of characters from any charset on a single page. Besides this, it is rapidly becoming the standard encoding for all sort of documents, on the web or otherwise.
There are disavantages: Netscape 4.7 mostly doesn't recognize the characters (except for the first 127 that are part of ASCII) and MacOS 9 and below has sometimes a weird way of displaying them.
One final word about the document title: even if you place the above meta before the title tag and tweak your server to transmit the correct MIME type almost any browser around will still use the OS's default 'window title' font for the title, so it will be displayed as expected only if that font contains the required glyphs (or shapes). It will display correctly in Google listings, nevertheless.
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