On Friday I discovered something odd about Apple’s iWeb. A customer was seeing that a site she’d uploaded was full of odd ‘Â’ characters.


It turns out that iWeb uses UTF-8 encoding of it’s text. Whilst UTF-8 is supported by most browsers it’s not the default encoding and thus we were seeing the odd ‘Â’ characters where there were characters that didn’t translate well (seemed to be mainly large spaces).

Now there’s probably a way to tell iWeb (or the uploading FTP program) not to use UTF-8 but if you don’t want to go digging for it then just create a file called ‘.htaccess’ in the root of your site and put the following line in it:

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

This will force viewing browsers to use the correct encoding and will solve the problem.