Hatrack River Forum: Displaying foreign languages in web browsers

This is topic Displaying foreign languages in web browsers in forum Books, Films, Food and Culture at Hatrack River Forum.

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Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :

This seems like it would be very easy, but I think I'm either doing something wrong or things don't work the way I expect they would.

I'm displaying pages written in German and French. They have all those non-English characters that we've all come to know and love that will get turned to ?s when viewed wtih only a US character set.

I figured this is no problem, because anyone browsing for these pages are going to have German and French character sets loaded into their browsers.

However, to test this assumption, I loaded up the German character set into IE7 and found that they are still displaying as ?s. Am I doing something wrong or is it more complicated than what I'm thinking?

Thanks.

Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :

You need to declare the encoding for the web page. Since you are using multiple languages, I suggest UTF-8. If the page is (compliant) XHTML, just add the appropriate xml header, and make sure the whole thing really is saved (or generated) as UTF-8. If the page is HTML, add a content-type metatag with the charset property set to utf-8. Make that one of the first tags inside your page head (just after title is typical), and of course, make sure the whole thing really is UTF-8.

edit: this page will help: http://www.w3.org/International/O-charset

Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :

Nevermind. I'm being a big stupid. There's a character set being explicitly set in the html code that I was given.

Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :

Thanks fugu.

Posted by Raia (Member # 4700) on :

I use firefox, and when I read pages that have Hebrew on them (like the paper), it's fine, no problems. But internet explorer hates my Hebrew! So I think part of it is the browsers, too.

Granted, fugu knows a lot more about it than I do. [Razz]

I just wanted to pretend like I was helping.

Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :

Raia: do these pages also have English or another language on them? IE will try, under certain circumstances, to 'guess' the encoding for a page. It is frequently wrong.

Posted by Raia (Member # 4700) on :

Erm... sometimes. But usually very little. It's not a problem, though, I just use firefox.

Posted by adfectio (Member # 11070) on :

The Hebrew I've read off of webpages has English right beside it, and it wasn't a problem at all. but..... again, Firefox