I have a simple piece of text like so:
<h1 class="intro-text" id="main-title">‘AN ABRAM’</h1>
This should render the following output (this is correct in Google Chrome):
But when I open the same file in Safari the output looks like this:
Why is this happening and how do I make sure this doesn't happen?
There may be a few issues of why your text is rendering differently in different browsers.
1. HTML charset not set to utf-8
This is a very common solution for your issue. Sometimes, the unexpected character rendering occurs when the charset isn't set to utf-8.
According to MDN Web Docs:
charset - This attribute declares the document's character encoding. If the attribute is present, its value must be an ASCII case-insensitive match for the string "utf-8", because UTF-8 is the only valid encoding for HTML5 documents. <meta> elements which declare a character encoding must be located entirely within the first 1024 bytes of the document.
In short, the charset attribute defines the character encoding, and what each character will "render" to.
To add this in your HTML, you need to add it in your <head>, like so.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
</head>
<body>
<h1 class="intro-text" id="main-title">‘AN ABRAM’</h1>
</body>
</html>
This should state that the encoding of the HTML document should be UTF-8. This way, Safari shouldn't print out the characters in a different way.
Note: There are known issues of Safari encoding the text differently than Google Chrome, so this solution is most likely the best fix.
2. Fonts (OP's working solution)
Another issue that could occur is the fonts that have been chosen to be on the webpage.
Sometimes, fonts can be the reason Safari doesn't render the symbols like normal. This can be for many reasons.
However, to see if fonts are the issue, then you should remove all of the font-family specifications in your CSS.
* {
font-family: "Some-Font"; /* Try and remove this */
}
The default font in a HTML document (if it isn't specified) is Times New Roman. If the issue doesn't occur after changing the font, then the issue was the font. In this case, you would need to find another font to be in your HTML document.
3. No DOCTYPE
The third issue in this list is no <!DOCTYPE html> at the start of your HTML.
Even though this solution may not be related to your issue, this is a good thing to try.
If you don't have the DOCTYPE, you need to add it in the location specified below.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
</head>
<body>
<h1>Title!</h1>
</body>
</html>
Shown on Line 1.
This may help solve the issue.
In conclusion, these are the three solutions. They are ranked from most likely to fix, from least likely to fix.
HTML charset not set to utf-8
Fonts (OP's working solution)
No DOCTYPE
These should fix your problem.
Related
Something that made me curious - supposedly the default character encoding in HTML5 is UTF-8. However if I have a plain simple HTML file with an HTML5 doctype like the code below, I get:
"hello" in Russian: "ЗдраÑтвуйте"
In Chrome 33+, Safari 6, IE11, etc.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<p>"hello" in Russian is "здраствуйте"</p>
</body>
</html>
What gives? Shouldn't the browser utilize the UTF-8 unicode standard and display the text correctly? I'm using Coda which is set to save html files with UTF-8 encoding by default so that's not the problem.
The text data in the example is UTF-8 encoded text misinterpreted as window-1252 encoded. The reason is that the encoding has not been specified and browsers are forced to make a guess. To fix this, specify the encoding; see the W3C page Character encodings. Two simple ways that work independently of server settings, as long as the server does not send wrong encoding information in HTTP headers:
1) Save the file as UTF-8 with BOM (there is probably an option for this in your authoring program.
2) Add the following tag into the head part:
<meta charset=utf-8>
There is no single default encoding specified for HTML5. On the contrary, browsers are expected to make guesses when no encoding has been declared. This is a fairly complex process, described in 8.2.2.2 Determining the character encoding.
If you want to be sure which charset will be used by browser you must have in your page head
<meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type">
otherwise you are at the mercy of local settings and browser automation.
I've got simple HTML pages in Russian with a bit of js in it.
Every browser going well except IE10. Even IE9 is fine. Next code is included:
<html lang="ru">
<meta http-equiv="Cоntent-Type" content="text/html"; charset="utf-8">
Also I've added .htacess with
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
Still IE10 loads page in Cyrillic encoding (cp-1251 I believe), the only way to display characters in a right way is to manually change it to UTF-8 inside of a browser (or chose auto-detect mode).
I don't understand why IE10 force load 1251 instead of UTF-8.
The website to check is http://btlabs.ru
What really causes the problem is that the HTTP headers sent by the server include
Content-Type: text/html; charset=windows-1251
This overrides any meta tags. You should of course fix the errors with the meta tag as pointed out in other answers, and run a markup validator to check your code, but to fix the actual problem, you need to fix the .htaccess file. Without seeing the file and other server-side issues, it is impossible to tell how to fix that (e.g., server settings might prevent the effect of a per-directory .htaccess file and apply one global file set by the server admin). Note that the file name must have two c's, not one (.htaccess, not `.htacess').
You can check what headers are e.g. using Rex Swain’s HTTP Viewer.
The reason why things work on other browsers is that they apply the modern HTML5 principle “BOM wins them all”. That is, an HTTP header wins a meta tag in specifying the character encoding, but if the actual data begins with three bytes that constitute the UTF-8 encoded form of the Byte Order Mark (BOM), then, no matter what, the data will be interpreted as UTF-8 encoded. For some unknown reason, IE 10 does not do that (and neither does IE 11).
But this won’t be a problem if you just make the server send an HTTP header that declares UTF-8.
If the server has been set to declare windows-1251 and you cannot possibly change that, then you just need to live with it. Transcode your HTML files to windows-1251 then, and declare windows-1251 in a meta tag. This means that if you need any characters outside the limited repertoire representable in windows-1251, you need to represent them using character references.
perhaps because your 'o' in 'content' is not an ascii 'o'. notice that it is not red in Stackoverflow? i then copied it to a good text editor and see that it is indeed not an o. because the 'o' is not really an ascii 'o', that whole line probably should get ignored in every web browser, which should then depend on what default charset it uses. Microsoft and IE is notorious for picking bad defaults, thus is my reason why it doesn't work in IE. ;)
but codingaround has good advice too. it's best to put quotes around your attribute values. but that should not break a web browser.
you should use a doctype at the start:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang='ru'>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
but the real culprit is your content and charset problem. notice my line. mine is very different. ;) that's the problem. note that mine has two ascii 'o's, one in "Content-Type" and another in 'content='.
As Shawn pointed out, copy and paste this:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
This is a really good example of how non-Ascii letters that look like English Ascii letters can really mess things up!
Maybe you forgot changing cоntent=text/html; to cоntent="text/html";
As Shawn has already pointed out, it could also be content="text/html; charset=utf-8".
But as you have tried both things out, can you confirm if the IE10 output looks like this?
I can't really help further with this, as the only thing I have here is an IE 10 online emulator.
So far the possible problems are:
Different o character
I see, that the <meta> tag is still outside of <head>, put it in place
Problems with IE handling the content and charset attributes
I have a website in HTML5. Most of the content there is in Czech, which has some special symbols like "ř, č, š" etc...
I searched the internet for recommended charsets and I got these answers: UTF-8, ISO 8859-2 and Windows-1250.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO 8859-2" />
I tried UTF-8 which didnt work at all and then settled up with ISO 8859-2. I tested my website on my computer in the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, IE and Opera. Everything worked fine but when I tested my website at http://browsershots.org/ , these characters were not displayed correctly (in the same browsers that I used for testing!).
How is that possible? How can I ensure, that all characters are displayed correctly in all web browsers. Is it possible that usage of HTML5 causes these problems (since its not fully supported by all browsers, but I am not using any advanced functions)?
Thanks for any hints and troubleshooting tips!
If you using HTML5, try this short declaration of charset:
<meta charset="UTF-8">
Additionally check you html file encoding. You can do it in Notepad++, menu Encoding -> Encode in UTF-8.
The important thing is that the actual encoding of the data coincides with the declared encoding. From the description, it seems that the actual encoding is ISO-8859-2, so you should declare it. Note that the name of the encoding has no space but hyphens. (I wonder whether you used it with a space – I would expect browsers to ignore the tag then.) The following is the simplest declaration:
<meta charset=ISO-8859-2>
I would not trust on browsershots.org getting things like this right. Testing on actual browsers is more useful.
UTF-8 is the best-supported character set for international usage. If it does not display correctly, you should ensure that your file is saved in UTF-8 format. Even Notepad has a "UTF-8" option in its save dialog.
When I type Korean in my html code and open it through my browser, Korean is not recognized by the browser and prints some weird words. What shall I do?
There must be few mistakes you are making.
First, You should have a doctype specified on your HTML page. Use HTML5 doctype
<!DOCTYPE html>
Second, you should specify the character encoding of the document as well. So, add:
<meta charset="utf-8" />
In your head section. Or for a longer version with better cross browser compatibility use:
<meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html; charset=utf-8'>
Also as Juhana said, your file must be saved with same encoding (i.e. Unicode UTF-8) to be able to store Unicode characters and display them.
I have an XHTML1.1 document with a mix of English and Japanese text, with charset indicators lang="jp" and xml:lang="jp" in the opening tag for the <html> element. The actual content is encoded in UTF-8, and this is stated in the content-type as well:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="jp" lang="jp">
<head>
<title>Test page</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8"/>
</head>
<body><div>今</div><div>込</div></body></html>
The XML/HTML specs say that the "lang" attribute is inherited, so the content should end up being rendered with a font that supports Japanese, but instead I'm seeing it use fonts that are intended for Chinese. (Japanese "kanji" are actually subtly different in many cases from the equivalent Chinese "Hanzi", and wildly different for a few common characters.)
For instance, in the above code the top part of the first character should be ˄ with a - under it. If a Chinese font is used instead, this character will invariably instead look like a ˄ with ` underneath. Also, the second character should have a shape that looks like 7\, but when a Chinese font is used it will more often look like a lambda, λ. Neither of these are correct print/screen forms in Japanese.
The question: is there a way to force browsers to pick Japanese fonts for CJK text without writing a CSS rule that just contains a hundred and one font names in the hopes that at least one of them will match what the user has installed?
(Since minimal CJK fonts are along the lines of >4MB, with complete ones more around 15~20MB, relying on an #font-face declaration to ensure the right font gets loaded would be slow.)
I'd like a solution that works in all major browsers.
At least in the modern browsers (in 2022, over a decade after you asked), the lang attribute will work the way you wanted it to, but the lang code you need is ja, not jp as you used in the question. (jp is the ISO 3166 code that identifies Japan, the country, while ja is the BCP 47 code that identifies Japanese, the language.)
We can demonstrate the behaviour in a modern browser with this simple test document:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xml:lang="ja" lang="ja">
<title>Test page</title>
<div>今</div>
<div>込</div>
</html>
As shown in the screenshot below (taken in Chrome in Ubuntu), the Japanese forms (kanji) of 今 and 込 get used when we open the document above:
... and if we change ja to zh in our HTML document, the Chinese forms (Hanzi) get used instead:
It similarly works if we use the XHTML from the question (after changing jp to ja), or if we use Firefox, or if we use a Windows or macOS browser.
Note that depending upon the browser and the OS, the use of Japanese glyphs may be implemented by way of language-specific glyphs within a single font (as is the case with the Noto Sans CJK JP font used by default for CJK characters in Chrome on Ubuntu) or by selecting a different default font. For instance, Chrome for Windows will use Microsoft YaHei for lang="zh" text but Yu Gothic for lang="ja" text.
Well, if all else fails, I would explicitly specify common Japanese fonts in the CSS. Look up which fonts are available on which platforms, and create a font stack.
Basically, just select fonts the old fashioned way, and see if that fixes the problem.