german charset settings for html

Forum Moderators: travelin cat

Message Too Old, No Replies

german charset settings for html

problems displaying unique characters

a2ztranslate

12:12 pm on Mar 4, 2004 (gmt 0)

hello all, a brief query to see if anyone has spotted this problem before.

when building webpages in german, we usually use the following code for language and charset
<html lang="de">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

we always test on both PC Win 98+, Mac OS9.1 +, IE5+, Netscape 4+ and Safari. We just updated our Safari browser and have since noticed that no matter what tinkering we do, the umlaut (the one with the two dots above the "u") won't display correctly (comes up as "&"). Any work around ideas?

Or should we just move to UTF? (but IE for Mac is not yet compliant...)

choster

1:08 pm on Mar 4, 2004 (gmt 0)

What entity are you using to display the character? Are you saying ä , ö, and ü do not render? They are all part of Latin-1, so you should not need to switch to UTF-8.

timster

4:56 pm on Mar 9, 2004 (gmt 0)

Or should we just move to UTF? (but IE for Mac is not yet compliant...)

That's the pickle isn't it? And UTF will never come IE for Mac, since development has ceased.

IMHO, if you need a maximum browser compatibility, you'll have to resort to HTML entities, and just wait until no-one uses non-UTF browsers.

What I've done in the past is to run the "raw" Web pages (that include non-Latins) through a regular expression that encodes non-Latin characters. (This process is generally reversible, when the time comes.)