Website Quality Alert

No character encoding defined

Problem:

The character encoding of the web page is not defined and could not be determined automatically.

We look for a character encoding definition in

• HTTP Content-Type header
  Example:
  

  Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
  

• XML header
  Example
  

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

• HTML Content-Type meta tag
  Example:
  

  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=GB2312">

We do not show this alert when there are only ASCII characters on the web page.

Impact:

Browsers may have difficulties showing the text of the page correctly.

Although most modern browsers would try to automatically detect the correct encoding, they may not always succeed. Also, one should keep in mind that the web is more and more surfed using devices such as mobile phones, game consoles or TV sets, which may have less capable and error tolerant browsers.

Additionally, search engines may not recognize the text of your pages correctly, so that people interested in your site's topics may not find it.

Recommendation:

Always specify the character encoding.