S'il vous plait - what's the deal with accented characters in Firefox?

February 21, 2007 10:54 AM

I'm reading through some instructional material regarding the French language from About.com, and am running up against some inconsistencies in the way accented characters are being rendered in Firefox. Some pages render correctly, and others do not - the accented characters are replaced by question mark characters (these pages render correctly in Safari). Why would there be a difference between pages like this?
posted by DandyRandy to computers & internet (2 comments total)

Whoever wrote their web software is handling character encodings improperly. Most likely, they're present a page as UTF-8 without knowing WTF that means. Bugs the hell out of me when developers do that.

Under "View" -> "Character Encodings" try a couple of the western ones. My guess is that the encoding is actually ISO-8859-1 or MacRoman.
posted by sbutler at 11:03 AM on February 21, 2007

Turned out to be Western (Windows 1252) - thanks for the pointer.
posted by DandyRandy at 2:04 PM on February 21, 2007