WebPages with cyrillic chars are not displayed correctly

[Viktor Barasov]

I am running an english Windows 2000.
When I use InternetExplorer 6.0 to visit russian pages some of them are
displayed correctly while other are not. Why?

http://www.spb.ru/

for example is shown without problems.

On the other hand on page

http://www.mabelek.com/rus/about.htm

all cyrillic chars are replaced by chars from various west european languages
(accents from France,Spain and german Umlaute).

So how do I get it working as well?

Is this a matter of Windows 2000 or Internet Explorer ?

Victor

[George Sexton]

I looked at this using FireFox. The one that that works says
the encoding is KOI8-R, while the one that doesn't work says the page
encoding is ISO-8859-1. In both cases, the reported encoding by FireFox
doesn't match the content-type tag in the document.
On Mon, 09 Jan 2006 12:12:45 +0000, Viktor Barasov wrote:

I am running an english Windows 2000. When I use InternetExplorer 6.0 to
visit russian pages some of them are displayed correctly while other are
not. Why?

http://www.spb.ru/

for example is shown without problems.

On the other hand on page

http://www.mabelek.com/rus/about.htm

all cyrillic chars are replaced by chars from various west european
languages (accents from France,Spain and german Umlaute).

So how do I get it working as well?

Is this a matter of Windows 2000 or Internet Explorer ?

Victor

--
George Sexton
MH Software, Inc. - Home of Connect Daily Web Calendar
http://www.mhsoftware.com/conectdaily.htm

[Jukka K. Korpela]

George Sexton wrote:

I looked at this using FireFox. The one that that works says
the encoding is KOI8-R, while the one that doesn't work says the page
encoding is ISO-8859-1. In both cases, the reported encoding by FireFox
doesn't match the content-type tag in the document.
I didn't realize that the original question had been massively
crossposted around various groups, with followups silently set to a
microsoft.* group. (That's very unproductive, except for getting wrong
answers.) I was careless enough to send my reply using the defaults,
i.e. obeying the Followup-To header. Below is a copy of my reply.

Briefly, the problem is indeed in the encodings. What browsers say about
encodings is not reliable as such, though.

Followups now set to comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html as a matter of
principle. Either this is about HTML authoring for the WWW, and in that
case there's no point in spawning separate discussions about it in
various microsoft.* groups, or it is not, and that case there was no
reason to post it to comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html.

Viktor Barasov wrote:
- - on page

http://www.mabelek.com/rus/about.htm

all cyrillic chars are replaced by chars from various west european languages (accents from France,Spain and german Umlaute).
The server www.mabelek.com announces the page as ISO-8859-1 (= ISO Latin
1) encoded. The page is apparently meant to be interpreted as
windows-1251 (= Windows Cyrillic) encoded and even contains a <meta> tag
saying that. However, by HTML specifications, actual HTTP headers win
any <meta> tags (and even IE follows the specs here).
So how do I get it working as well?
The problem should be fixed by the server administrator or by the
author. You cannot do this for them, but you could send them a
complaint. Stay tuned to no reaction; in my experience, even otherwise
reasonable people fail to grasp character encoding issues (even when in
position where they really should know about them).

What you can do, in your own browsing, is to manually set the encoding.
On Internet Explorer, select View / Encoding / Windows Cyrillic.
Is this a matter of Windows 2000 or Internet Explorer ?

No, the browser behaves correctly in this issue. (Someone might say that
it really should not even let you manually set the encoding, since the
specifications really say which encoding shall be used in the
interpretation. But this would be too Puristic: there are all too many
pages around that are sent with incorrect information about encoding.)