ChanandlerBong - 12:52 am on Sep 17, 2012 (gmt 0)

What a nightmare weekend!

I have changed all the encoding in all my web pages to UTF-8, had enough of those pesky little black diamonds for unknown characters. Added AddDefaultCharset UTF-8 to htaccess too.

But now I have one final problem. When I view webpages locally, they're coming out as plain text. When I view "page info" in FF, it says:

Type: text/plain
Render Mode: quirks mode
Encoding: UTF-8

The very same page viewed on my server is fine: text/html, Standards compliance mode, UTF-8

why the difference? Because of the htaccess file? Is that not being applied locally? Will I need to add content-type meta tags to all my pages in order to be able to view them locally as webpages? When I added this meta tag to one page, it came out fine locally. Interestingly, it was the content="charset=UTF-8" that got it working, rather than the content="text/html;". So it seems that although it's now encoded in UTF-8, Firefox doesn't realise that unless it's told.

Why did the change to the UTF-8 encoding make this difference? I never before had problems viewing webpages locally but my text editor encoded them as "Dos/Windows" (whatever that is!)

I would prefer not to add content-type meta tags to 3k pages, just to be able to view them locally. Any ideas?