Char encoding and MSIE (was RE: New W3C Validator and character encoding)

[Luc Grondin]

Hello,

To add a point on this thread: it has been our experience that to properly
display UTF-8 characters in the higher ranges (diacritics, etc), with MSIE,
it is necessary to include the meta tag:

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

It looks like the encoding specified in the XML declaration (<?xml
version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> is not taken into consideration by MSIE.

This is not visible with an English-only text, but, for instance, with a
French text, all the diacritics are displayed as double "funny" characters
(since these characters in UTF-8 are two bytes long).  When you add the meta
tag, the character display becomes fine.

  ---
  Luc Grondin
  Analyste en gestion de l'information numérique
  SERTI - DGTIC, Université de Montréal
  téléphone: (514) 343-6111 p. 3988  -  télécopieur: (514) 343-2155

> -----Message d'origine-----
> De : Andrew Cunningham [mailto:andrewc at mail.vicnet.net.au]
> Envoyé : 26 novembre, 2002 18:27
> À : Multiple recipients of list
> Objet : [WEB4LIB] RE: New W3C Validator and character encoding
>
>
> I'd assume that the validator is comparing the character encoding in
> three places:
>
> 1) the http header
> 2) the xml declaration
> 3) the meta tag
>
> at least in theory it should.
>
> Robert Sullivan wrote:
> >>The XML encoding and the HTML character set need to be the same.
> >>Either UTF-8, iso-8859-1, or us-ascii, just make them the
> same in both
> >>places. Any of the three would probably be correct enough, though
> >>us-ascii is the narrowest match.
> >
> >
> > Thomas Dowling suggested removing the meta tag which contained the
> > encoding, and that seemed to work.
> >
> >
> >>When I validated your home page by saving it locally then
> uploading it
> >>post-edit,
> >>the validator complained that my browser wasn't sending the right
> >>encoding request in the HTTP header - until I stopped using MSIE and
> >>used Mozilla instead.
> >
> >
> > I got that too when I checked a local file, but not after I
> uploaded it.
> > Must be an Internet Explorer quirk.
> >
> > Thanks for the suggestions on and off the list.
> >
> > Bob Sullivan  <rsullivan at sals.edu>
> > Schenectady County Public Library (NY)  <http://www.scpl.org/>
> > Schenectady Digital History Archive
> > <http://www.schenectadyhistory.org/>
> >
> >
> > .
> >
>
>
> --
> Andrew Cunningham
> Multilingual  Technical Officer
> OPT, Vicnet
> State Library of Victoria
> Australia
>
> andrewc at vicnet.net.au
>
> Ph: +61-3-8664-7001
> Fax: +61-3-9639-2175
>
> http://home.vicnet.net.au/~andrewc/
> http://www.openroad.net.au/
>
>
>



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