meta content in foreign language ASCII

[GeeBay]

Hello,

I'm doing description and keyword metatags for foreign language pages that
contain letters with accents (non-english letters). when doing meta-tags
containing this foreign-language info, is is proper to insert the acutal
character, or the HTML code using the combo?

thanks for any advice on this ...

(ps, I assume same for <title> tag and <alt image> tag too?

 

[Kris]

I'm doing description and keyword metatags for foreign language pages that
contain letters with accents (non-english letters). when doing meta-tags
containing this foreign-language info, is is proper to insert the acutal
character, or the HTML code using the combo?

Depending on whether you are using a relevant character encoding for the
document, it doesn't matter much. You can use character references
regardless of any encoding.

thanks for any advice on this ...

(ps, I assume same for <title> tag and <alt image> tag too?

Yes, but there is no <alt image> tag. You probably mean the image
element which holds an alt attribute. You can use character references
on some attributes too, like title, alt and summary.

A recab of terminology..
These are exaples of tags: <a>, </a>, <img>, <td>, </foo> (opening and
closing tags mixed)
This is an example of an element: <a href="foo">foobar</a> (opening +
closing tags and its content)

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

I'm doing description and keyword metatags for foreign language pages

Why? It's usually worse than useless. Search engines generally ignore them
or pay them very little attention (though there are still rumors that say
that they punish for anything they regard as keyword spamming), but the
"worse than" part comes from the fact that authors waste their time in
writing the metanonsense _and_ rely on it, thereby failing to make the
document's content proper search engine friendly (which is mostly the same
as human friendly, especially blind human friendly).

that contain letters with accents (non-english letters). when doing
meta-tags containing this foreign-language info, is is proper to insert
the acutal character, or the HTML code using the combo?

If you however write metababble, the same rules apply as to normal textual
content, except of course that no tags are allowed. If accented letters as
such work properly in normal text, they work in attribute values as well.