german characters not displayed in Mozilla Firefox

crmpicco · November 17th, 2007, 07:29 PM

I am having an issue with German characters not being shown on my website, they are presently being shown as a '?' - question mark.

However, this problem only pertains to Firefox - it works perfectly in IE.

This is the URL:

http://www.ayrshireminis.com/mini/de/index.php?lang=DE

This is the HTML code at the top of the script:

Code:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="ayrshire minis, ayrshire mini, ayrshire, mini, cooper, rover, clubman, bmw, ayr, mauchline, kilmarnock, chat, forum, gallery, german, english, germany, new mini, mini cooper, contact us, links">
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="a place for Mini enthusiasts to meet and discuss about all things Mini">
<TITLE>AyrshireMinis.com - a Mini E-Community</TITLE>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-LANGUAGE" CONTENT="DE">
<META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="14 days">
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="all">
<META NAME="Author" CONTENT="Craig Richard Morton">
<META NAME="Copyright" CONTENT="AyrshireMinis.com 2007">
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="/mini/js/general.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/mini/inc/style.css">
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
.....

Thanks,
Picco

_______________________
Ayrshire Minis - a Mini E-Community
www.ayrshireminis.com

chroniclemaster1 · November 22nd, 2007, 08:23 AM

Here's how I start all my webpages...

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

The two key points are specifying the language and the character encoding. The language is specified in the HTML tag, which obviously you'll change to de for German. But most importantly you need to add the meta tag for the character encoding. My English pages will still render German (and other) special characters just fine as long as I use their proper character entities and you have defined your character set.

I'd also use the full doctype. You're using HTML 4.0 which will change a couple places between our code, but otherwise they should look the same. Using the shorter form of the doctype may be throwing your page into Quirks mode. I doubt this is causing your problem, but it's one more possibility.

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