I earlier posted http://forum.by-expression.com/forums/thread/3.aspx about how just making a simple change of a copyright date using the Beta version of Microsoft Expression somehow changed the encoding declaration in certain of my website's pages (and made special characters display whacky).

Cheryl or others, I fixed the issues and know where in the html the declaration appears, but where|how in Expression' settings is this applied|controlled?  Where do I tell it a default?  (I can't find it in the settings, etc.)  I'd like to edit my Frontpage created website in Expression rather than Frontpage, but I can't have a new editor application silently altering things, or another way to say it:  I want to understand and properly set up Expression to encode things as I desire|anticipate|direct it to.

Thanks! 

Lawrence,

looks like my Frontpage edited|created website pages have the following line of code:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">

 which I understand may a proprietary MS encoding?

I think what happened is when I did the simplest of edits with Microsoft Expression this may have been replaced with an iso-8859-1 encoding.

It seems from your guidance I need this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">, correct?

Any tricks to be sure my edits or new pages edited in Microsoft Expression render this code automatically? I made this change (modifying to this code) to fix one page successfully.

Sorry, Cheryl, if I'm asking dumb questions.

Thanks, so much! 

To get the type of characters you saw the characterset applied would be utf-8. There are actually two places you change the default. Use Site | Site Settings and I think language tab (I'm on a computer with out Expession installed) and under Page Editor Options which I think has a language tab as well.

OK here is a real newbie question for you.  What is this BOM thingy?  What does it do or not do?  Do a want it or should I avoid it like the plague? I have seen the term a few times and have no idea what you are talking about.

See by-expression.com/tutorials/characterset/index.aspx