posted
Very good fundamental treatise. I wonder why we have been disputing all the time.
BTW: Has anyone else problems with their character set when displaying Boris' pages? I don't know if it only applies to German systems, but every time when I am on a Czech site a hardly readable font is used as default font instead of Times. Boris: The problem disappears if you change the meta tag to "charset=windows".
------------------ "No, thanks. I've had enough. One more cup and I'll jump to warp." (Janeway, asked if she would like some coffee in "Once upon a Time") www.uni-siegen.de/~ihe/bs/startrek/
Jim Phelps
watches Voyager AFTER 51030
Member # 102
posted
I deliberately specified the font as Times or Times New Roman in an attempt to avoid having that thick unwieldy font on Mac systems. PC systems seem to work just fine with or without font specifications. If it's the character set then I'll check on it.
posted
The charset tag switches the browser to another character set. I don't know if Frank also uses Netscape, but the Navigator 4.x offers the possibility to do the same manually. I couldn't figure out whether the first overrides the latter format or the other way round. The browser seems to display what it wants. I have the English Netscape version, and since it is obviously a browser problem, I guess that all people with the same browser meet the same problems.
Western ISO-8859-1 seems to be the usual (English) character set, and it always works for English pages. It's also the default setting of my pages (German version of Front Page), even if the language is supposed to be German. This tells me this character set can't be wrong. Umlaute are correctly displayed, I don't know about special characters in other languages.
Western ISO-8859-2 and Windows-1250 are called "Central European". These ones mess up the browser (even the text-only windows). Sometimes it affects the subsequent pages (even those with 8859-1), sometimes not (only if you open a new window?). The font face tag doesn't change anything.
I'm even more confused than before. Anyway, ISO-8859-1 seems to work perfectly.
Recently, I was on a Japanese page, and this one even messed up the pop-up windows, "Open file...", "Save as..." that have nothing to do with the browser.