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In some European languages we use accents like à or special letters like ç. So in the html I use à ç But what about places like the title of the page, description tag, the alt of an img or the title of a link. I think I can write special characters in that places but what is the most correct way to write this type of code? I mean should I use à or à ?

Nrc
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    This question appears to be off-topic because it is about SEO, not programming. – Oliver Charlesworth Jun 07 '14 at 11:40
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    Sorry, it is not only seo. My question is what is the correct way to write that type of html code. Not to get visitors, just to do good code – Nrc Jun 07 '14 at 11:42
  • `` and you're good to go even with šđčćž just make sure to encode `&` using `&` ;) or just be careful with it's use in HTML5 – Roko C. Buljan Jun 07 '14 at 12:20
  • possible duplicate of [Do I need to use HTML entities for special characters if I'm using the UTF-8 charset?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7405007/do-i-need-to-use-html-entities-for-special-characters-if-im-using-the-utf-8-cha) – rink.attendant.6 Jun 07 '14 at 19:10
  • I do not understand why this is not the right place to ask that. It is just a question about how to write good code. Can someone explain ? – Nrc Jun 08 '14 at 09:34

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It does not matter, because entity references like à are resolved by HTML parsers, in browser, search engines, and other relevant software. Provided that the character encoding is properly declared, as it should be anyway, the difference is only in writing HTML documents.

If you think that it is easier, in some authoring environment, to create and edit HTML documents containing à rather than à, consider whether this justifies reduced readability of HTML source (to human eyes).

There is of course size difference between, say, à (normally 7 bytes) and à (usually 1 or 2 bytes depending on encoding), and the size affects data transfer times, but these days such issues are seldom important. (Text content tends to be a minor part of the total size of a page in bytes.)

Whether people use accents in searches is irrelevant here. The entity à stands for the very same character as à, with the accent.

Jukka K. Korpela
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