Default Character Encoding in Mozilla/Firefox

Patrick

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Jul 10, 2006, 3:28:30 PM7/10/06

to

I am using Firefox version 1.5.0.3 under Fedora Core 5 Linux.

I have 2 questions regarding the "Default Character Encoding" option in
Mozilla/Firefox:

Question 1)
The Firefox help says "The character encoding selected here will be
used to display pages that do not specify which encoding to use".
Then what am I missing?:
1) I check that ISO-8859-15 is the default character encoding;
2) I create an HTML document without specification of charset and
containing non-ASCII characters; e.g. <html><head></head><body>À Noël
ou à Pâques</body></html>
3) I save the document as ISO-8859-15;
4) Yet when I open the document in Firefox, I can see in
"View/Character Encoding" that Firefox interprets it as UTF-8 and, as a
result, each non-ASCII character is replaced (by the U+FFFD replacement
character).

Question 2)
Why is this option hidden in the "Font & Colors / Advanced" section of
the Preferences ? If I remember well, earlier versions used to have it
somewhere in a "Languages" section (a much better place IMHO).

Thanks in advance

Patrick

Moz Champion (Dan)

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Jul 10, 2006, 7:45:11 PM7/10/06

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Do you have a url for this site that doesnt use the default?

Menu space and placement are at a premium in Firefox and the developers
make changes as they see fit

»Q«

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Jul 10, 2006, 8:14:09 PM7/10/06

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"Patrick" <romb...@hotmail.com> wrote in
<news:1152559710.3...@b28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>:

> I am using Firefox version 1.5.0.3 under Fedora Core 5 Linux.
>
> I have 2 questions regarding the "Default Character Encoding"
> option in Mozilla/Firefox:
>
> Question 1)
> The Firefox help says "The character encoding selected here will
> be used to display pages that do not specify which encoding to
> use". Then what am I missing?:
> 1) I check that ISO-8859-15 is the default character
> encoding;
> 2) I create an HTML document without specification
> of charset and containing non-ASCII characters; e.g.
> <html><head></head><body>À Noël ou à Pâques</body></html>
> 3) I save the document as ISO-8859-15;
> 4) Yet when I open the document in Firefox, I can see in
> "View/Character Encoding" that Firefox interprets it as UTF-8 and,
> as a result, each non-ASCII character is replaced (by the U+FFFD
> replacement character).

It works for me, Firefox 1.5.0.4, en-US, under WinXP home, using your
steps. In step 3, what do you mean by 'save as ISO-8858-15'? My
text editor doesn't have such an option, so I just saved it as
test.htm.

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»Q«

Patrick

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Jul 11, 2006, 4:37:55 AM7/11/06

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Thanks for replying.

> >
> Do you have a url for this site that doesnt use the default?
>

No. Sorry if I was not clear enough: the HTML document is saved on my
local disk and opened in Firefox via the File menu.

> Menu space and placement are at a premium in Firefox and the developers
> make changes as they see fit

I am not sure I understand what you mean here. My point is simply that
character encoding has less to do with fonts & colors than with
languages, which is why I am wondering why the developers chose to make
that change from previous versions.

Patrick

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Jul 11, 2006, 5:16:24 AM7/11/06

to

Thanks for trying this.

>
> It works for me, Firefox 1.5.0.4, en-US, under WinXP home, using your
> steps. In step 3, what do you mean by 'save as ISO-8858-15'? My
> text editor doesn't have such an option, so I just saved it as
> test.htm.
>

In order to be sure that this test works, you need to know in which
character encoding your document is saved. My text editor (Gedit)
allows me to choose between ISO-8859-15 and UTF-8.

Patrick

Moz Champion (Dan)

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Jul 11, 2006, 7:00:34 AM7/11/06

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Not certain if local files are treated the same as web pages or sites.
A question for the developers perhaps.

As to why the developers chose to change the menu location for
something, you would have to ask them

»Q«

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Jul 11, 2006, 4:08:53 PM7/11/06

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"Patrick" <romb...@hotmail.com> wrote in
<news:1152609384.8...@m79g2000cwm.googlegroups.com>:

Looking again, my editor does have a 'convert to UTF-8' option, but I
didn't use it. I just cut-and-pasted from your earlier post, then
saved. My newsreader doesn't actually have any charset support. It
displays using Windows-1252. Your post was in ISO-8859-1. I'm pretty
sure that for the characters you posted, all three charsets coincide,
and I don't think my cut-paste-save changed the encoding.

With the default Firefox charset set to ISO-8859-15, Fx used that
charset and displayed it correctly. When I manually changed the
charset to UTF-8, the display was mangled.

--
»Q«

Patrick

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Jul 12, 2006, 10:12:02 AM7/12/06

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Thanks again »Q«.

Could you please try the other way round ? I.e.:

1) In Firefox change your Default Character Encoding to UTF-8
2) Save test.htm as ISO-8859-1 (again with no META tag in the header)
3) Open test.htm

Shouldn't we expect Firefox to use its default char. encoding and hence
mangle the display in this case ?

Patrick

»Q« schreef:

Patrick

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Jul 12, 2006, 4:33:55 PM7/12/06

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Stupid me!

The change of the default character encoding is taken into account only
after restarting Firefox!

Thanks for your help!

Patrick

»Q«

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Jul 12, 2006, 8:40:42 PM7/12/06

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"Patrick" <romb...@hotmail.com> wrote in
<news:1152736434.9...@p79g2000cwp.googlegroups.com>:

> Stupid me!
>
> The change of the default character encoding is taken into account
> only after restarting Firefox!

Ah! I didn't think of that either. I was restarting it each time, out
of habit.

> Thanks for your help!

Sure. I'm just glad the mystery was solved. :)

--
»Q«