I not sure if this is the right place or not. Here it goes I have a windows
2003 server running IIS 6.0. I'm having problems where the websites
characters are chnaging from this Bahá'í Conference to Bahá'í Conference.
Now if I put in the header of the web page <meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/> it fixes the problem. My problem
lies in that I'm hosting 46 websites and some have used this fix and others
have not. Is there a way to set the IIS server to default to
charset=iso-8859-1 in the metabase or somewhere else. This way it defaults to
this for all websites.

On Aug 26, 7:16 pm, Marco <Ma> wrote:
> I not sure if this is the right place or not. Here it goes I have a windows
> 2003 server running IIS 6.0. I'm having problems where the websites
> characters are chnaging from this Bah? Conference to Bahá'í Conference.
> Now if I put in the header of the web page <meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
> content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/> it fixes the problem. My problem
> lies in that I'm hosting 46 websites and some have used this fix and others
> have not. Is there a way to set the IIS server to default to
> charset=iso-8859-1 in the metabase or somewhere else. This way it defaults to
> this for all websites.


You can do what you want in IIS with a single setting, but it is not
the right solution because you are simply taking responsibility for
someone else's problem, and I do not think you are even legally
obligated nor responsible for it.

This is a classic, long-standing dispute between the web server, the
server administrator, and the content-provider.

The real problem is that the content-provider generates a web page
with insufficient information to correctly interpret it. However, the
content-provider has no idea about this; they just expect the server
administrator to magically make the web server solve their problems
since they think that's what they are paid to do. But, the web server
can hardly compensate for that information.

Tell your website owners that it is their responsibility to fix how
their website appear to browsers. It is certainly not the server/
administrators' job to make sure hosted websites are interpreted
properly. You should only be responsible for the server to be up and
responsive to requests.

I suspect that you think of this as an issue that has an easy
"solution" with an IIS setting, and that you think this is the last
you will see of this "issue"... but you are misguided. The problem is
ultimately with the web pages, and if you don't make their authors do
the right thing now, then it will only be a matter of time before the
next missing encoding happens, and you will be forever at their mercy
to tweak such settings on their behalf. Why not make them be
responsible up front?


///David
http://w3--4u.blogspot.com
http://blogs.msdn.com/David.Wang
//

maybe in an ideal world I could ask people to fix their sites. Unfortunatley
thats not the case. I have over 20 customers with this problem if I tell them
to hire someone to fix their sites then I may lose them. problem is I just
moved all these customers to a new machine. The old machine didn't have this
problem, so I suspect IIS was set up before since I took over. I can
encourage new customers to make sure they address this issue, but not the
older customers. I nade the suggestion to one already and they switched to
someone else. So please if you know how to address this please tell me.

Thanks.

"David Wang" wrote:
[..]

On Aug 27, 6:32 am, Marco <Ma> wrote:
[..]
>
> "David Wang" wrote:
>>
>>
>
> - Show quoted text -


Set the MIME map on a per-website basis to return "text/html;
charset=iso-8859-1" for the .htm extension. This will not require a
IIS restart.

The global MIME map default for .htm is text/html and will require a
IIS restart to change, but you hardly want to do this. As you can see,
it is one default vs. another, and what is good default for one
customer may not be good for another, so you must only do this on a
per-website basis for each customer.

And now you see the problem you get yourself into -- because now you
have 46 independent settings to keep track of. You can't just set it
globally because now you change default values for another custom who
may break because of it. You don't really know. And now you are stuck
maintaining this value for every single customer when it is really
their job to properly describe how their HTML should be interpreted.

It will be in your best interest to get customers moved over to take
this responsibility over their web pages, but as you've noted,
customers have no incentive to take this responsibility at all. Hence
this is a classic dispute. The problem is really with the customer,
but the customer is never wrong; the web server is also functioning
correctly as configured, so you can't blame the server; thus, the
server administrator is stuck in the middle and must suck up this
dispute.


//David
http://w3-4u.blogspot.com
http://blogs.msdn.com/David.Wang
//