suspire

I'm trying to learn a few Swiss German phrases for my trip and have found this website:

http://www.eldrid.ch/swgerman.htm

However, all the umlauted letters show up as question marks on my screen.

Does anyone know what I need to do to make these appear as they're supposed to? Or is that even possible?

Thanks!!

Robespierre

No, it isn't possible.

They probably aren't rendering correctly because the author of the page used some half-assed keyboard shortcut like Alt+nnn on a Wintel computer, or Option+u+x on a Mac. Here's the correct way to do it in web documents:
<b>
&amp;auml;
&amp;euml;
&amp;iuml;
&amp;ouml;
&amp;uuml;
</b>
Note that each character begins with an ampersand &amp; and ends with a semicolon ;

suspire

Ah, thanks! Well, if it's not possible I won't worry about it. The correct html is good information - thanks for passing that along!! Now to find another site with some Swiss German on it.

Thanks!

logos999

&gt; appear as they're supposed to?
Working nicely here, no problem at all.
Internet Explorer is using ISO-8895-1 encoding. You can change encoding in the menu, but have to restart Internet Explorer afterwards to display the page correctly.

suspire

Ah, that seems to be the problem. I was using Firefox; when I open it in IE it works fine. THANKS!

Robespierre

Ah, but if it were correctly coded in HTML, it wouldn't be browser-dependent. That's why there are standards, you see. The fact that the code page IE loads renders correctly is a fluke.

logos999

It's the way it is, by design . Since not everybody uses &quot;&amp;umls&quot;, the correct codepage is what you need to make it work. Western ISO-8895's in this case. Browsers which use this a default work with all umlauts and western languages whatsoever. Just write &quot;&uuml;&quot;, not &quot;&uuml;&quot;.

Robespierre

We have a philosophical difference. I think it is incumbent upon a web page author or publisher to write content that will work on any browser with any code page. It should <u>not</u> be the user's responsibility.

You sound more like Fodor's: it's the way it is, take it or leave it.

logos999

This is close to evil, how the Fodors input box abuses my different &uuml;'s ;-)

Robespierre

Case closed.

logos999

Yes

hopscotch

The author of the page says &quot;These pages are 100% home-made.&quot; That is obvious when you look at the source code. It was probably typed on a German keyboard. The umlauts are 'natural' and not coded.

It is an interesting site and it rendered perfectly in Firefox 1.5. Maybe you should upgrade your version of Firefox.

Robespierre

Again: it's not the browser brand or version that matters. It's what code page a particular instance of a particular browser is using that determines whether or not character codes are displayed correctly.

Grownups don't use keyboard codes; they code with the W3C ampersand sequences.

<b>That's why there are standards.</b>

logos999

I thought you wanted to close the case

hopscotch

Heck no, it's not closed. This is going to the United Nations -- for a decision by the year 2049. I should be dead by then.