Why would a website's encoding default to Cyrillic?

[Nocturnal]

There is a website I frequent both their forum and main page encoding is
Cyrillic which is for Russia. The website is not hosted in Russia either.
In their HTML all of the encoding is set to Iso-8559-1 which is the USA
standard. What could be overriding their iso-8559-1 and encoding it to
Cyrillic?

 

[Roy Schestowitz]

__/ [Nocturnal] on Monday 28 November 2005 07:18 \__

There is a website I frequent both their forum and main page encoding is
Cyrillic which is for Russia. The website is not hosted in Russia either.
In their HTML all of the encoding is set to Iso-8559-1 which is the USA
standard. What could be overriding their iso-8559-1 and encoding it to
Cyrillic?

Which browser are you using? That's an important factor. Also, have any
symbols have been embedded in these pages which are not interpetable by
Iso-8559-1? As you mentioned a forum (thus open content), has anything
been entered in Cyrillic? That might explain why Iso-8559-1 is overridden,
supposedly in order to 'help' you. I don't think a hybrid of encodings is
ever possible, so an encoding fallback is assumed to be preferable.

Roy

 

[Benjamin Niemann]

There is a website I frequent both their forum and main page encoding is
Cyrillic which is for Russia. The website is not hosted in Russia either.
In their HTML all of the encoding is set to Iso-8559-1 which is the USA
standard. What could be overriding their iso-8559-1 and encoding it to
Cyrillic?

Have you looked at the HTTP header 'Content-Type'? If there's a character
set declared (e.g. 'text/html; charset=utf-8' or similar) it will override
any declaration in the HTML document itself.
(I would not be suprised, if a russian webmaster configures his/her server
to send a default character set suitable for cyrillic documents).

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

There is a website I frequent both their forum and main page encoding is
Cyrillic which is for Russia.

There is no encoding with the name "Cyrillic". There are several encodings
that have the word "Cyrillic" as part of their informal name. Many of them
are suitable for several languages written in Cyrillic letters, not just
Russian, in Russia and elsewhere.

Why don't you specify the URL of the site?

The website is not hosted in Russia either.
"Either"?

In their HTML all of the encoding is set to Iso-8559-1

Are you sure? How?

which is the USA standard.

It isn't. Ask the ANSI if you think otherwise.

What could be overriding their iso-8559-1 and encoding it to
Cyrillic?

HTTP headers or your browser.