Why doesn't Flare add meta tag inside <head> tag?

rhofitz · Post by **rhofitz** » Tue Sep 09, 2008 11:43 am

We are finding that some of our characters (like em dashes, copyright symbols) are displaying as garbage characters in our WebHelp HTML output (as shown in the Eclipse help viewer, which is based on IE). In order to resolve this, I am having to add the following line just following my <head> tag.

Code: Select all

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=UTF-8" />

I need to do this in my output,each time I generate, since I think Flare will remove this line if I add it to the source, right? .

Its seems good practice to do use this meta tag, as I read in this article quoted below, so I wonder why Flare does not add this to the headers. I noticed that 4.0 allows you to add the DOCTYPE to the files, which is great, but I think we also should be able to add the meta tag to the header. I don't think I can add the metag tag via a masterpage, can I?

XHTML
There are two tags - the encoding attribute in the initial XML tag and the charset meta tag (with a final slash). Both tags should be included for cross-browser compatability.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=UTF-8" />
...
</head>

Note: These tags should be included even though XML is theoretically Unicode by default. Not all browsers will parse a page as Unicode unless the meta tag is present.

Post by **RamonS** » Tue Sep 09, 2008 11:49 am

Is it a required element based on the W3C standards? If not, then there is no need to have it there. Just because IE is too dumb to display something doesn't mean everyone has to jump.

rhofitz · Post by **rhofitz** » Tue Sep 09, 2008 12:52 pm

So you are saying Flare doesn't support IE?

Post by **LTinker68** » Tue Sep 09, 2008 1:01 pm

rhofitz wrote:I don't think I can add the metag tag via a masterpage, can I?

Theoretically you can, although you'll have to do it manually. That is, open the masterpage in the Internal Text Editor and add that declaration. Or you can use that option in v4, although I haven't played with it, so I'm not sure how you use it, but copying-and-pasting the code you mentioned into the masterpage should work.

Post by **RamonS** » Tue Sep 09, 2008 1:19 pm

rhofitz wrote:So you are saying Flare doesn't support IE?

Flare supports web standards, which IE doesn't.

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Why doesn't Flare add meta tag inside <head> tag?

Why doesn't Flare add meta tag inside <head> tag?

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Re: Why doesn't Flare add meta tag inside <head> tag?