If your HTML files do not specify a character encoding, then the web browser
is going to supply its default encoding. In most instances, this is going
to be ISO-8859-1 or a close enough relative of it that nothing will change.
However, this is user-configurable so if some user's default is set to a
different character set they might see something funky.
What you can do to try to prevent this is to specify a character encoding in
your HTML, by including a line like this in your <HEAD> section:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> (or
whatever character set was used to create your document)
If you've used an HTML authoring tool it will likely have already put this
in for you. But -- I'm pretty sure that in at least some browsers users can
choose to have the browser's default take precedence.
See http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/charset.html
http://ungwe.org/blog/2004/01/26/22:52/
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2003Sep/0176.html
I will try to come up with a testbed by tomorrow so folks can get a preview.
-----Original Message-----
From: Cheryl A Akers [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, July 12, 2005 3:59 PM
To: Jim Green
Subject: Re: [MSUNAG] config change -- AFS web sites
Hi Jim,
How can those of us using the departmental web sites check that the sites
will be OK under the new configuration?
Thanks,
Cheryl
Jim Green writes:
> ACNS has decided to make a change to the configuration of the
> www.msu.edu web servers. These servers house MSU's main web site and also
personal and
> departmental web sites in AFS space with www.msu.edu/user/netid URLs.
>
> On Thursday, July 14, at approximately 8:00am, the server
> configuration will be changed so that it no longer forces the
> ISO-8859-1 character set to be used. This will allow different
> default character sets to be specified in web browsers, and also in
> the HTML code of web pages in AFS. The benefit of this is that AFS
> users will now be able to specify Unicode or other non-English or
> special character sets in their web documents.
>
> We have tested MSU's web site under the new configuration and have
> determined that the change will have no visible effect. It is
> possible, however, that some users will see changes when viewing
> documents in AFS personal/departmental sites. In almost all
> instances, the web browser will supply a reasonable default character
> set. Any undesirable effects may be corrected by specifying a default
> character set in the web browser or in the HTML document.
>
> This was brought to our attention by a student who wanted to use UTF-8
> to support Chinese characters in his AFS web site.
>
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