What is going on?

[mbay]

Hello everyone!

I was taking a look at my page online:

http://h1.ripway.com/mbay/lbproductions/index.htm

as you can see, there's a few "?" marks where accents should be, etc.

While comparing it on another hosting provider:

http://flyservers.registerfly.com/members5/lbproductions.ca/index_test.htm

I now see everything as it should be.

Is it possible that hosting providers, depending on their setup, can read xhtml differently?

Thanks in advance,

mbay

[VIPStephan]

On the ripway server page I see only question marks in the source code too, so no wonder why there are question marks on the page. On the other page there are correct entities for the special characters...

Maybe you should try and change the character encoding in the meta tag?

[Arbitrator]

Your page is being displayed in a character encoding other than the one it was authored for. It seems to have been authored for ISO-8859-1 but is displaying in UTF-8. You can change the character encoding used to view your page under your browser's View menu to see the difference. In Firefox, this would also affect the source code since it's displayed in the same encoding as the webpage instead of Notepad (IE).

I'd advise the same thing as VIPStephan; use a meta element to specify the encoding:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/>.

You can help ensure that special characters will always display as intended by using character entities instead of typing them literally. If you're using Windows XP, you can get some of the entity references by loading the Character Map program and looking in the bottom left; the entity will be written out as &#xHHHH; where HHHH is to be replaced by the alphanumeric reference shown (you can drop leading zeros). You can also get the four digit references you need by typing the literal character into the box here (http://www.hot-tips.co.uk/useful/unicode_converter.HTML). You might also see numbers in the lower right of the Character Map for a few of the characters; those are decimal references as opposed to hexidecimal and are typed in the same way but without the leading x.

Example: © = &copy; = &#x00a9; = &#xa9;

Character Map: Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools.
Resources: Wikipedia: List of XML and HTML Character Entity References (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_and_HTML_character_entity_references); Convert Text to Hexidecimal Unicode Escape Sequence (http://www.hot-tips.co.uk/useful/unicode_converter.HTML).

[JustinSainton]

Generally speaking, UTF-8 is the safest way to go. But, with certain characters, like apostrophes, quotation marks, non-standard marks like Spanish accents, it's good to use the HTML entity for that character. W3C has a great list that is quite comprehensive, check it out at http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_entities.asp