Setting the Title/Encoding Page Properties options

The Title/Encoding Page Properties category lets you specify the document encoding type that is specific to the language used to author your web pages as well as specify which Unicode Normalization Form to use with that encoding type.

Title specifies the page title that appears in the title bar of the Document window and most browser windows. See Changing the document title.

Document Type (DTD) specifies a document type definition. For example, you can make an HTML document XHTML-compliant by selecting XHTML 1.0 Transitional or XHTML 1.0 Strict from the pop-up menu. For more information, see About the XHTML code generated by Dreamweaver.

Encoding specifies the encoding used for characters in the document. For more information about document encoding, see Understanding document encoding.

Unicode Normalization Form is only enabled if you select UTF-8 as a document encoding. There are four Unicode Normalization Forms. The most important is Normalization Form C because it’s the most common form used in the Character Model for the World Wide Web. Macromedia provides the other three Unicode Normalization Forms for completeness.

In Unicode, there are some characters that are visually similar but can be stored within the document in different ways. For example, "?" (e-umlaut) can be represented as a single character, "e-umlaut," or as two characters, "regular Latin e" + "combining umlaut." A Unicode combining character is one that gets used with the previous character, so the umlaut would appear above the "Latin e." Both forms result in the same visual typography, but what is saved in the file is different for each form.

Normalization is the process of making sure all characters that can be saved in different forms are all saved using the same from. That is, all "?" characters in a document are saved as single "e-umlaut" or as "e" + "combining umlaut," and not as both forms in one document.

For more information on Unicode Normalization and the specific forms that can be used, see the Unicode website at www.unicode.org/reports/tr15.

Include Unicode Signature (BOM) lets you include a Byte Order Mark (BOM) in the document. A BOM is 2 to 4 bytes at the beginning of a text file that identifies a file as Unicode, and if so, the byte order of the following bytes. Because UTF-8 has no byte order, adding a UTF-8 BOM is optional. For UTF-16 and UTF-32, it is required.