Inserted symbols and site publishing errors.

[JSeitz]

When I publish a web site from local to www or visa versa, many of my ' and -
become ?. I then have to go through all the pages and manually change the ?
marks to either a single quote ' or a dash -. Also, when I try to insert a
symbol, it looks fine in my FP 2003 editor and preview but when I look at the
actual web site, it looks like Japanese. Any ideas? My clients are not
really impressed when I don't know this is happening.

 

[Jens Peter Karlsen [FP MVP]]

Post a link to a page that shows this.

Regards Jens Peter Karlsen. Microsoft MVP - Frontpage.

 

[Ronx]

You are using "smart quotes" and similar entities and your server
(probably) sends an HTTP header forcing the character set to be UTF-8
(this can be confirmed if you show us a link to the problem page).
UTF-8 will always display these symbols as '?' unless they are
inserted in the page as numeric or character references/entities.
See www.rxs-enterprises.org/tests/pages/symbols.htm
and http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_entitiesref.asp

 

[JSeitz]

Here is a link where I insert a symbol é - It looks fine in FP but in the
browser looks completely different.

http://www.johnpaulstrain.com/art/beside-still-waters.htm

I have corrected all the pages with the ?. The ? happened after I moved all
my client sites to a new server. Everything was fine before that.

Is there anyway to change a setting to keep this from happening? I have
another site I am ready to publish and really don't want to go through every
page to make those corrections.

 

[JSeitz]

http://www.johnpaulstrain.com/art/beside-still-waters.htm shows the effects
of trying to insert a é symbol. I don't currently have any pages with the ?
but could probably create one. I'm publishing a site as we speak and will
probably get some of them.

 

[Ronx]

The http headers being delivered by your server are:

Response Headers -
http://www.johnpaulstrain.com/art/beside-still-waters.htm
Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2005 13:45:51 GMT
Server: Apache
Last-Modified: Mon, 18 Apr 2005 20:59:31 GMT
Etag: "40c1fc-27fa-44b112c0"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 10234
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

200 OK

The Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
sets the character set, and UTF-8 requires that symbols be entered in
the HTML as entities - see my previous post (included below)
Symbols include any character not included in the ASCII codes 32 to
127, and a few within that range as well, such as <,>, apostrophe '.

You could ask that the host remove this header, or replace it with
charset=ISO-8859-1. However the replacement will affect websites that
require UTF-8 (depending on how the server is configured.)

 

[Ronx]

The Gicl? shows as Gicl square in IE, and as Gicl?es in FireFox.
Incidentally, there are layout issues with FireFox as the browser is
resized to smaller width.