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I still remember the day that the "View > Encoding" menu of browsers was absolutely critical in browsing the web if you browsed enough sites that were outside o
by erichurkman 13y ago
I still remember the day that the "View > Encoding" menu of browsers was absolutely critical in browsing the web if you browsed enough sites that were outside of your normal locale (your default codepage in Windows). The menu is still there, at least in Firefox & Chrome, but I haven't used it in a few years, as most things Just Work™ for modern websites, largely thanks to UTF-8.
- gsnedders 13y agoThe eventual browser default is still (sadly) browser locale dependent, so the menu exists for sites designed for a different locale. I and some others still hope one day we can get rid of that (likely replaced with per domain, primarily TLDs, defaults).
- deathanatos 13y agoIn IE, you mean? A standards-compliant browser shouldn't need to guess at the encoding. It can be found in the <meta> tag or (if that wasn't supplied or we're not dealing with HTML) in the Content-Type header. If it isn't found there, I believe HTML says, "it's ISO-8859-1 (latin1)". That said, certain browsers have been known to guess.
- gsnedders 13y agoIE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari all have locale-dependent defaults for HTML. The process used is essentially: user-override, BOM, higher-level metadata (e.g., Content-Type in HTTP), meta pre-parsing, and then a locale-dependent default (Windows-1252 in most locales). Anything labelled "ISO-8859-1" is actually treated as Windows-1252 in browsers (they differ only in ISO-8859-1's C1 range, so Windows-1252 is a graphical superset). http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/parsing.html#determining-the-character-encoding http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/... has the detail of what all browsers implement nowadays.