quote:
Originally posted by Mnjul
A UTF-8 encoded page can be viewed correctly in Windows Me (under IE6).
Then the reasons are bandwidth/storage economy, and perhaps browser/OS compatibility.
As for the META HTTP-EQUIV tag, I could very possibly be wrong about what I said - but one thing's for sure, it does
not override the server's header information. How do I know? The exact same HTML code (a Hebrew page with the above META tag included) was displayed fine (ie. in Hebrew) on one server, while on the other it wasn't.
I'm not sure exactly how this stuff works, but obviously the problematic server was sending wrong language information in the header, and it was overiding the META tag. Using header() with PHP corrected this behavior in the problematic server:
<? header("Content-type: text/html; charset=windows-1255"); ?>
All this made me theorize that HTTP servers interpret the META tag - and that the problematic server didn't do it (because of its configuration). But since the idea of the Web server interpreting META tags does seem strange, now I suspect that the problematic server was forcing western (Latin based) letters on all its pages, while the other one let the browser decide on it.
Time will tell what the case will be with the HTTP server on msgplus.net...