Which charset should i use for multilingual website?

My website is going to support multi languages , as of now english , french, chinese..

So i used the charset开发者_StackOverflow charset=iso-8859-1 but the chinese character are rendered, then i changed them to charset=UTF-8 but the accent character in french are not displayed.

What's the best charset definition for multilingual websites?

And what's the best in my case?

---

Use UTF-8 unless your primary content is targeted at Asia, in which case use UTF-16. (They contain the same set of characters, but -8 is generally more efficient for Western characters and -16 for Eastern characters)

You have to make sure the data is encoded in the encoding you specify. Just telling a web server to claim that the data is UTF-8 is not enough.

See also:

• Choosing & applying a character encoding
• Setting encoding in web authoring applications
• Declaring character encodings in HTML