This snippet explains how to fix Internet Explorer and Firefox form encoding issues when posting data to a server having a different encoding than the source system.

This happens, for example, when you host a form on a server using ISO-8859-1 that posts data to a server using UTF-8.

The fix for Firefox (and Opera and other sensible browsers) is to use the accept-charset attribute:

<form ...  accept-charset="utf-8">

The fix for Internet Explorer is to use a hack:

<form ...  accept-charset="utf-8">
  <input type="hidden" name="enc" value="&#153;">
</form>

The hidden input field will make Internet Explorer understand that you want it to support UTF-8.

$.ajax({
    type: 'GET',
    url: '/some/good/stuff.xml',
    dataType: 'xml',
    error: function(xhr) {
        alert('Failed to parse feed');
    },
    success: function(xml) {
        var channel = $('channel', xml).eq(0);
        var items = [];
        $('item', xml).each( function() {
            var item = {};
            item.title = $(this).find('title').eq(0).text();
            item.link = $(this).find('link').eq(0).text();
            item.description = $(this).find('description').eq(0).text();
            item.updated = $(this).find('pubDate').eq(0).text();
            item.id = $(this).find('guid').eq(0).text();
            items.push(item);
        });
        console.dir(items);
    }
});

Your friend Internet Explorer

For IE 6 and better (worse?) the feed must return the right content type, so make sure the response contains this header:

Content-type: text/xml

If this header is not set the jQuery Ajax error handler is called and the feed is not parsed.

Tell IE to use standards mode, not quirks mode

Define your doctype in your HTML:

<!DOCTYPE> element

See: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288325(v=vs.85).aspx

Tell IE to not use compatibility mode

This prevents, for example, IE 11 from using IE 7 rendering mode which can happen for many reasons.

If you can’t add an HTTP header, then add this to your HTML and pray that it helps:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />

IE is using a compatibility mode if you see “compatible; MSIE” in the user agent header:

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0;"

See:

• http://stackoverflow.com/a/9338959
• https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff405803(v=vs.85).aspx
• https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ieinternals/2013/09/21/internet-explorer-11s-many-user-agent-strings/

Validate your HTML and CSS

https://validator.w3.org/

Use an IE hack

Try “zoom” or “!important”.