Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
The meta section of HTML documents can contain a keyword section.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<meta name="description" content="under construction" />
<meta name="keywords"
content="..." />
Can one use unicode characters in this section (i.e., \u00B0)? If yes how?
All the characters you put into an HTML document, whether in attribute values or elsewhere, as Unicode characters. If the character encoding of your document is UTF-8, as your example declares (but it had better be UTF-8 encoded then!), you can enter any characters, such as the degree sign (°), directly there. How you do that depends on your authoring environment. You can alternatively use a character reference (
like °) or, for some characters, an entity reference (like °).But \u00B0 is not an HTML notation. It just a sequence of six characters. It has a special meaning in JavaScript, but not in HTML. The corresponding HTML notation is
°.Search engines will probably ignore special characters like the degree sign in keywords. But not necessarily; Google has been observed to be sensitive to them in some special situations. (Not for the degree sign at the moment, it seems.)
In
<meta name=description ...>tags, special characters may be relevant if search engines use their content when constructing the page description for search result lists. Such things still happen, though less frequently than they used to.