Language encoding issues in posts

[Marcia]

Some characters are coming out strangely in posts today; it appears to be an issue with the language encoding specs for the pages.

If the tech folks can't see it from their end, I can grab some screenshots and forward them, but it should be easy enough to remedy by including a language encoding tag in the head section.

It's happening in multiple (all) threads, not just a few.

[encyclo]

In Firefox, go to View, Character Encoding and swap to Western (ISO-8859-1). WebmasterWorld doesn't declare a default character encoding, so the browser sometimes selects the wrong one for the content of the page. "Curly quotes" are particularly problematic (copy/pasted from articles on other sites, for example).

[Marcia]

I'm using IE same as I usually do, and seeing "strange bits" appearing in posts all of a sudden, whereas they weren't there before.

If I'm not experiencing the issue anyplace else, is it really an issue that I (and everyone else who may access the site) need special instructions to adjust their browser settings for?

Added:

Western (ISO-8859-1)

That's the setting already in FF as the default, BTW (already checked out and verified), but not being too terribly tech-savvy, maybe there's some equivalent to "Best viewed in Netscape 4.8" or "Best viewed in Internet Explorer 4" that I'm somehow not catching onto. ;)

[edited by: Marcia at 1:19 pm (utc) on July 28, 2008]

[encyclo]

What do you get if I use “curly quotes” or apostrophe’s in this thread?

[lawman]

Your curly quotes and apostrophe are slanted rather than stright up and down.

[Marcia]

Just for the record, I haven't been seeing it any more.