Sitemaps doesn't seem to recognize pages coded in UTF-8 and see them
as US-ASCII instead, even if the right META charset is declared in the
pages.

I read somewhere that any extended characters have to in the pages ,
to be recognized as UTF-8...

Does anybody knows something about that? Does it have an incidence on
the way pages are indexed/crawled ?

Thanks.

OK see here for some discussions and clarifications:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGIH_...

In a nutshell we can say that the chaaracters in US-ASCII can be said
to form  a subset of UTF-8 . US-ASCII is also a subset of ISO-859-1 .
But ISO-8859-1 is not a subset of UTF-8 .

If your document only contains only characters found in US-ASCII, even
if you set the charset encoding to UTF-8 it will be reported as US-
ASCII in Webmaster Tools.
Similalry if your charset encoding is set to ISO-889-1 but all the
characters used as part of US-ASCII (e.g. no accented characters are
present) that too will be reported as being US-ASCII.

On Jun 23, 5:05 am, michelm wrote:

Merci, thanks, for the explanation.
What I dont't understand is that the W3C Markup validator doesn't
validate my site if I manually choose the US-ASCII encoding.
But it's OK if I select UTF-8 or iso-8859-1.
I know that all pages contains at least one extended character ( the
french ç ) and saved in UTF-8.
But I changed from iso-8859-1 to UTF-8  2 or 3 months ago only, so
maybe Google doesn't refresh the encoding statistics very often and I
will see the correct encoding later...