Sort out charset issues

[directhex]

The forums are set to use ISO-8859-1 encoding (western european), as per:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />

The main site is using UTF-8 (universal), as this is the default for XHTML 1.1 sites, but is incorrectly being served with the text/html MIME type. The specs suggest that text/* has a default of ISO-8859-1 unless overridden, but text/html is invalid for XHTML anyway, so browsers may behave in an odd manner on this.

Mixing charsets never works - typically, it shows "advanced" characters up as an A with a hat on it, followed by one or more random characters. There's already mixing going on, as contributors writing content to the main site (which is being saved as UTF-8, because it seems most browsers are using that charset for the main site in the absence of correct explicit instructions) - but the automatic forum links are showing un-rewritten UTF8 in ISO-8859-1 mode.

For a practical example, look at the quote on British Telecom faces up to its Gremlins as it comes, then try using your browser's View/Character Encoding setting to jump between ISO-8859-1 (what the page tells you it is) and UTF-8 (what it actually is in this case)

[TAKTAK]

must admit, that does get quite annoying, and it's not particularly hard to fix...
you need to pick 1, and stick with it

[Steve]

Well it's actually a little harder than that, when you have two different servers, two different databases, one that's been converted to UTF-8 and one that hasn't, and a web developer with no time on his hands.

[TAKTAK]

ahh, point taken