[OT] Adelphia mojibake problem solved

[Doug Ewell]

Thanks to the advice of Unicode list members, I finally added the
necessary setting to my Web site that overrides Adelphia's blind
propensity to serve all pages, even correctly tagged UTF-8 pages, as ISO
8859-1. So my site is back in working order, with all non-Basic Latin
characters displaying properly.

Following the advice provided by James Kass and Richard Ishida, I added
a file called .htaccess that contains the following line:

AddType "text/html; charset=UTF-8" html

(The double quotes here apparently work as well as Richard's suggested
single quotes.) I didn't even have to petition Adelphia for any special
FileInfo permission, which is a good thing.

I strongly suggest to Adelphia that they make information about this
workaround available to any other customers who experience similar
problems with "garbage characters."

Three cheers to Martin Dürst, James, and Richard for their expert help;
thanks to the Adelphia CS people who tried their best to help; one big
raspberry to the rep who called me back saying they wouldn't pursue a
solution because I was the only one who had complained.

Sorry for the mostly OT post, but at least the problem was related to my
use of UTF-8.

-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/



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[Philippe Verdy]

Post by Doug Ewell
Thanks to the advice of Unicode list members, I finally added the
necessary setting to my Web site that overrides Adelphia's blind
propensity to serve all pages, even correctly tagged UTF-8 pages, as ISO
8859-1. So my site is back in working order, with all non-Basic Latin
characters displaying properly.
Following the advice provided by James Kass and Richard Ishida, I added
AddType "text/html; charset=UTF-8" html
(The double quotes here apparently work as well as Richard's suggested
single quotes.) I didn't even have to petition Adelphia for any special
FileInfo permission, which is a good thing.

The standard default setting is normally:
AddType "text/html" html
without a charset indicator.

With this setting, you are forcing _all_ HTML pages to be declared with
UTF-8.
If this is true for your site, then that's good. But if you need to have
some pages
declared differently (for example when showing sample pages encoded with
"shift_jis"), you'll get another similar problem...

I don't know which webserver they use, but recent versions of Apache can
read
and interpret the content of HTML pages to autodetect the UTF forms or use
the <meta http-equiv> tags to set or change additional HTTP headers,
according
to what authors desired on their pages. Same thing for XML files that are
sent
according to the charset found in the leading XML declaration line.




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[Doug Ewell]

Post by Philippe Verdy
AddType "text/html" html
without a charset indicator.
With this setting, you are forcing _all_ HTML pages to be declared
with UTF-8. If this is true for your site, then that's good. But if
you need to have some pages declared differently (for example when
showing sample pages encoded with "shift_jis"), you'll get another
similar problem...

Not a problem for me. I'm committed to using Unicode. And while there
are some interesting sites out there that present the same information
in different encodings (so you can see, for example, which font your
browser chooses), mine won't be one of them.

Post by Philippe Verdy
I don't know which webserver they use,

Apache 2.0

Post by Philippe Verdy
but recent versions of Apache can read and interpret the content of
HTML pages to autodetect the UTF forms or use the <meta http-equiv>
tags to set or change additional HTTP headers, according to what
authors desired on their pages. Same thing for XML files that are sent
according to the charset found in the leading XML declaration line.

IF the administrators don't sabotage the whole deal by including the
line "AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1". Contrary to the normal meaning of
"default," this option apparently forces ALL pages to be served as ISO
8859-1, including XHTML pages like mine that specify UTF-8 in both the
XML declaration AND in the <meta http-equiv> tag. Even adding a U+FEFF
signature wasn't enough to convince Apache that the page was UTF-8
(though it did convince Internet Explorer).

-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/



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