I am the sort of person that likes to know everything I can about everything, even if I don't really need to. Regarding Wordpress, I'm sure that I could find a handful of settings that aren't well known or understood; we trust that their default values are sufficient. Today, we'll be working with Wordpress 3.0 and exploring the Encoding for pages and feeds located in wp-admin~>Settings~>Reading.
Before we understand how encoding type applies to Wordpress, we need to understand what encoding type is. Technologies that work with multilingual or multi-script text data use a process called character encoding for interacting (creating, editing, sorting... etc) with that text data.
There are a wide variety of character encodings and each encoding type has two main elements; a set of characters and another system used to display or interpret those characters. Commonly, numbers or a combination of numbers & letters are used as the system to describe the characters in the encoding type. Two popular types of encoding that you might have heard of are Binary and Hexadecimal. If you have ever specified color in a web page or css file with something like; #C0C0C0 - then you have used the Hexadecimal encoding type.
To put this is perspective evaluate the word; "The". To us the word, "The" is a definitive article (grammar speak) but what does it mean to a computer that can only understand numbers? To a computer the word, "The" means 010101000100100001000101 in binary encoding, which is the only true language that a computer understands. Of course we as humans couldn't find much use for 010101000100100001000101 when typing on our computers - so we have character encoding that serves as the middle man between what the computer understands and what we see on our output devices.
What happens when you speak a different language or have a language that uses symbols rather than Latin characters or have a software manufacture that wants their software to display a particular way? The simple answer is, you end up with multiple encoding types - which is what we have today.
For the devices and computers in most areas of the Western Hemisphere the 8-Bit Unicode (UTF-8) character encoding will work and transcend most devices in those areas.
If you would like more in-depth reading on character encoding I invite you to go to the NRSI Computers & Writing Systems web page on character encoding.
About this Author
Ryan Huff is the founder of MyCodeTree, The Ultimate WordPress Companion! MyCodeTree offers off site backups of the WordPress database and content files, security authentication, virus scanning, security enhancements and so much more!
Visit http://mycodetree.com today and start enhancing your WordPress website today!
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