Why does Firefox sometimes have problems correctly displaying some special characters in it's browser? On occurences it sometimes replaces the special character with a "?" which is very annoying and makes the web design look very unprofessional. Does anyone else experience this?
Most likely the character encoding your HTML document was saved as does not match the character encoding you've declared with the META element.
Yes he is referring to the meta tag that tells your browser which character encoding you are using, for exmample : <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
Many thanks! That line worked for me, I had no idea about this. Previously I only had the line: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
Don't remove the line !!!! It is necessary too. just add the line i gave you under it. glad it helped
Also, for other people's websites were you don't control the character encoding, I fixed my firefox font errors by messing with "character encoding" under the "View" heading of my browser. On auto-detect, Universal seems to work fine, and Unicode(UTF-8) is selected. I dunno if this is the totally correct way, but it has worked for me. Those goofy ?'s are annoying to constantly stare at. HTH...
Due to market share, I would guess the majority of Web sites are built on Windows machines. It has also been my experience that very few people are aware of character encodings: they simply hit 'Save' in Notepad—or whatever editor—with no consideration of what encoding it is being saved as. Assuming these guesses are mostly accurate, it would be safer to force the character encoding to be Windows-1252, since most HTML documents will have been saved with this encoding. However, you also say that you have set Auto-Detect to Universal. This means that your explicit choice of encoding to force, such as UTF-8, may be changed to a different encoding automatically by the browser to whatever encoding it determines the page to be composed of.