How can I make Chinese characters show in IE8 without forcing compatibility mode?

Question

All the solutions for this issue say to use , which works because it forces the browser t

Answer 1

This sounds like an encoding problem to me. Chinese characters are probably being output using UTF-8 encoding, but the browser is not being told that and is defaulting to another encoding.

Try including this line:

That should force the browser into UTF-8 encoding. (This line is included in the site linked in the referenced question: http://www.canadainternational.gc.ca/china-chine/index.aspx?lang=eng, which works fine in my IE8 and defaults to UTF-8.)

Note that the original question states that this is actually a separate issue entirely, involving IE8 relying on installed Windows language packs, while IE7 and earlier did not.

---

Alternatively as a quick-hack fix, you can just use IE conditionals to only present the meta tag to IE8 browsers.

IE7 should ignore this line, causing it to render normally.