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Firefox 11 on Mac: UTF-8 not displaying correctly (' chatacter for one--as ?). Safari works fine. Not previoudly a problem.

  • 6 replies
  • 8 have this problem
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  • Last reply by BobMac

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A page that specifies UTF-8 encoding is not displaying correctly: ? shows for ' character. Same page in Safari is correct. Page from same site that uses encoding ISO-8859-1 is correct. All pages that fail with UTF-8 also have a Render Mode of Quirks mode. UTF-8 from another site which has a Mode of Standards compliance mode is correct.

Site is crvboy.org, which is a reading site that posts various stories. It uses JS.

A page that specifies UTF-8 encoding is not displaying correctly: ? shows for ' character. Same page in Safari is correct. Page from same site that uses encoding ISO-8859-1 is correct. All pages that fail with UTF-8 also have a Render Mode of Quirks mode. UTF-8 from another site which has a Mode of Standards compliance mode is correct. Site is crvboy.org, which is a reading site that posts various stories. It uses JS.

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<strike>Can you post a link to a page that shows the '?' ?</strike>

It is possible that it is a site problem and they use characters in the 0x80 - 0x9f range (Windows-1252) to represent the quotes and that range isn't covered in UTF-8.

I forgot to check the page in UTF-8.
The quote in "Dark Star’s Song" is indeed a ’ code that Firefox translates to an Unicode quote ’(&#x2019;) in ISO-8859-1

Modified by cor-el

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As mentioned, this works on Safari; and used to work in FF. A page where it is very obvious is http://www.crvboy.org/stories/jeffallen/s006/c01.html. This page shows none of the ?. Unfortunately, Safari does not seem to have the equivalent of Page Info that FF has. Clicking on page info for the linked page shows UTF-8 with a Render Mode of Quirks.

The site doesn't seem to mandate any particular encoding. UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 are both used. I would assume it would depend on the writing tool used by the original author.

But keep in mind, this is a recent problem that I'm seeing on this site that Safari handles correctly.

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That is a not a real Unicode page, but a page in Windows ANSI code with ’ (’) quotes.
You can't display that page in UTF-8 or you will get FF FD codes (�)

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Okay. . .

FF labels it as UTF-8; Safari has no problem with the page; and when I originally read the story at least a year ago--in FF--the page was correct. I would remember it if it wasn't since the author makes liberal use of '. Of course, a year ago it would have been an older version of FF.

Another data point: I just fired up my Windows 7 laptop; brought up FF (same release level as on the Mac); and Page info for the page says encoding is ISO-8859-1.

And, I've just discovered, Safari uses its default encoding on the page--Western (ISO Latin 1).

FF, on the Mac, would use ISO-8859-1 as its default, if not otherwise instructed by the site for the page.

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What is the default encoding in Firefox?

  • Firefox > Preferences > Content : Fonts & Colors > Advanced > Default Character Encoding
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ISO-8859-1