HTML header meta-tags
Reply #2 – 2002-12-22 20:12:59
Is this character set the default setting for all pages in Hydrogen Audio? It might explain why I sometimes have difficulties with extended characters of some posters like apostrophes or the Euro symbol. Perhaps another character set would be better like UTF-8? Yes, all pages have that header. ISO-8859-1 is Latin-1 and covers English as well as most western european languages, and is in fact the default charset with most browsers. Also, english is the presupposed language here. But you are right, the Euro symbol sometimes makes problems... we should see how UTF-8 behaves. Then it will become difficult if someone doesn't use the same character set in his postings and inserts characters that do not exist in ISO-8859-1 or on different positions in this table. "Honz..." for example uses some Mozilla version, probably not defaulted with this character set, and uses another key for apostrophes like the usual one, so when I reply to him the apostrophes in his quotes get garbled with weird numbers after appearing on HA (but not in my browser cache while writing my answer, so I can only notice this problem after I've already posted my reply). The same must happen with the Euro sign, because ISO-8859-1 doesn't know this symbol (ISO-8859-15 would be the correct extended character set).I miss e.g. MP4 in these keywords while others are redundant like mentioning "audio compression" twice or not separating "ogg" and "vorbis" with a comma. Hehe, how did i know that you miss MP4. I compiled this list in 5 minutes, and JohnV or Dibrom made some additions. "audio compression" is mentioned twice, because "audio", "compression" and "audio compression" can be regarded as three different keywords. I also miss mp3PRO and WMA by the way... And you don't have to list combined expressions like the one above separately, because the search engine will do this job if someone explicitely types "audio compression" into the search field. The same is true for "ogg" and "vorbis", so you don't need another "ogg vorbis" in the keyword list. And small letters are enough, too, because the search robots don't give a damn. By the way, search robots usually don't index so many keywords as meta-tags (if at all), so it would be better to clean them up, i.e. deleting the very unspecific ones and putting the important ones like the file extensions at the beginning of the tag. Hmm really, i've seen much bigger lists. Anyway, good suggestion. Me too, but only because most people don't know about these meta-tags or simply don't care or think keywords would be the most important part in designing a website for a high ranking in the important search engines. But it's much more important that the listed keywords appear in the body of a HTML page as often as possible, because some search engines index only this part or do a comparison between header and body to avoid high rankings for spammer sites and the like.But this also makes me wonder if anybody has ever subscribed www.hydrogenaudio.org to the most prominent search engines I'm not certain about this... i somehow presumed it, but never really thought about it. Dibrom or JohnV can probably answer this. If they've missed this or it was long ago maybe, it doesn't do any harm to repeat it now and then, but not within one week or two, because this would also be considered as trying to push the ranking of a spammer site by the search engines and the URL would get blocked by them and wouldn't appear as a search result at all.