Daxim on 19/6/2002 at 13:53

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IIS does not specify the <b>document charset</b> in the <b>HTTP header</b>: <a href="http://www.schroepl.net/cgi-bin/http_trace.pl?method=HEAD&url=http://ttlg.com/forums/">HTTP header tracing</a>
Conform to HTTP/1.1 and change <tt>Content-Type: text/html</tt> to <tt>Content-Type: text/html; Charset=iso-8859-15</tt>.

Neither does the <b>document</b> itself specify its <b>character encoding</b>: <a href="http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://ttlg.com/forums/">HTML validation service with encoding detection</a>
Since MSIE/Win does not care about HTTP headers (stupid broken browser), also insert <tt>&lt;meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; Charset=ISO-8859-15" /&gt;</tt> into the <tt>&lt;head&gt;</tt> of each document.

<b>Note</b>: ISO-8859-15 (a.k.a. Latin 9) is basically the same as ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1), except it has the &euro; character properly defined. For further details have a look at <a href="http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html">Roman Czyborra's page</a>.

<b>Positive result</b>: The &euro; character will be more consistently displayed across different browsers and platforms as of now they don't know what they're up to and have to guess the charset.

<b>Negative result</b>: The forums' Europeans who like to (ab)use the &acute; (acute accent) when they actually want to type an ' (apostrophe) because <a href="http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/apostrophe.html">the key is in a slightly more prominent position</a> will notice that this won't work anymore and be likely a bit irked since they're now forced to use the proper key which is <a href="http://www.hermessoft.com/newproject/lang.html">on most keyboard layouts</a> shifted (and therefore a bit slower to type).

Daxim on 20/6/2002 at 06:58

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Netscape4 and MSIE/Win get it wrong (as they insert the illegal character 128 instead of 164 when you press the &euro; key), the whole rest of the (browser) world does it now properly. I would blame that wrongdoing on typical american cultural imperialism (cue Gray), but it can be also adequately explained by sheer stupidity of the browser programmers.:p

There's nothing we could do to fix that, so a (http://webstandards.org/act/bug/) bug report is due. Past experience with Microsoft however lets me predict that they'll reply this is actually a feature, not a bug.