Non-alphanumeric characters displaying as boxes

[Robert Paulson]

I just noticed something odd about our website and how some characters are displayed - it seems that characters like ë, >, < all show up as a square box instead of the character. Is this an issue with my browser, the site, or our server?

[encyclo]

It sounds like a character encoding problem. Are you using a meta charset tag on your page? If yes, which one are you using?

[Robert Paulson]

Son of a buck - you know, I just changed something on the site to assist with W3C issues....I bet that was it.

Thanks for the tip - I'll try that out.

[tedster]

This often depends on the specfic computer being used to view the site - if the charset has no font it can reference on the computer that contains a specific character, you see a square.

I recently started working with a Russian language site and a Chinese language site. After installing the required fonts, my search engine results all of sudden showed lots fewer square characters.

But given the specific characters that you are reporting trouble with, I think encyclo set you in a good direction.