Trouble accessing some posts on IE 6

[Bueller_007]

Unfortunately, at work, I am forced to use IE 6.0 to access the internet.

There are serious problems using IE on this forum whenever I try to access a thread on the forum whose topic line contains Japanese characters. At least 90% of the time, the page does not load at all, leaving me with simply a white screen.

[JonB]

I noticed that too but it is not as high as 90% for me - thankfully

[annie]

I hadn't had that problem until today.

I'm also forced to use IE on a computer at work... on a network that has banned e-mailed and almost every other way of entertaining myself beyond japanesepod101

[Bueller_007]

I hadn't had that problem until today.

I'm also forced to use IE on a computer at work... on a network that has banned e-mailed and almost every other way of entertaining myself beyond japanesepod101

Same here.

[Alan]

I've given up on IE6. Every other access to the forum doesn't decode japanese characters correctly. This has happened since the year dot. Doing a page refresh therefore solves the problem. This happens on quite a few other sites too. I think the problem is that IE by default attempts to guess the page character encoding & gets it wrong every other time. I can't double check this, as I'm using my mac because of the better multi-lingual support; windows sucks somewhat in this regard.

'Fortunately' for me, I can't access jpod at work (the banning algorithm knocks out any site with mp3s), and at home I use firefox as the multiligual support works better.

[annie]

I've given up on IE6. Every other access to the forum doesn't decode japanese characters correctly.

Ironically, both Buellerさん and I are logging in from computers using Japanese operating systems, in Japan.

[Bueller_007]

Doing a page refresh therefore solves the problem.

Refresh does nothing for me on IE6, but you got me thinking about decoding, and I went to a couple of new threads that I wasn't able to access on IE6, namely this one:
http://www.japanesepod101.com/forum/vie ... highlight=
and this one:
http://www.japanesepod101.com/forum/vie ... highlight=

And if you go to the IE view menu (表示 for us folks in Japan) and go to the decoding settings, you'll notice that the f'ed-up white pages have autodecoded as Shift-JIS. If you change the encoding over to Unicode (UTF-8), the page will automatically reload and you'll get your content.

So I guess that IE's crappy auto-decoding actually was the problem. Pretty bad considering there's a line right in the source that says:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

Good call. And now we have a solution.

[annie]

So I guess that IE's crappy auto-decoding actually was the problem. Pretty bad considering there's a line right in the source that says:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

Good call. And now we have a solution.

It worked for me too. (and thanks for the Japanese browser instructions...)

I never even considered trying to change the encoding, I suppose I'm used to the Mac encoding problems, where everything just shows up with funky boxes/characters.

[atomsk]

The Browser should use the charset set in the http header sent from the server, not the charset in the http-equiv attribute of the meta tag. But who knows what IE does? (>_<)

[Jason]

Doing a page refresh therefore solves the problem.

Refresh does nothing for me on IE6, but you got me thinking about decoding, and I went to a couple of new threads that I wasn't able to access on IE6, namely this one:
http://www.japanesepod101.com/forum/vie ... highlight=
and this one:
http://www.japanesepod101.com/forum/vie ... highlight=

And if you go to the IE view menu (表示 for us folks in Japan) and go to the decoding settings, you'll notice that the f'ed-up white pages have autodecoded as Shift-JIS. If you change the encoding over to Unicode (UTF-8), the page will automatically reload and you'll get your content.

So I guess that IE's crappy auto-decoding actually was the problem. Pretty bad considering there's a line right in the source that says:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

Good call. And now we have a solution.

Could you pass this along to kowoji-kohnoさん please?