[thelist] I need help with extended Latin characters

[Diane Soini]

I'm trying to fix some weirdness with extended Latin characters and 
forms, but I am having trouble understanding browser behavior and 
extended characters.

I see a lot of weirdness even just copying and pasting into textfields 
words with extended latin chars (256 - 383) between browser windows. 
The weirdness differs from browser to browser (NS4 being the worst 
offender naturally.) The weirdness is I can copy text on a web page, 
but when I paste it, the text transforms into gibberish. Sometimes it 
pastes ok, but sometimes it doesn't.

I tried fiddling with browser settings and meta tags, but nothing 
seemed to make the problem go away or act consistently. And it's not 
consistent from server to server.

I've searched around the web some, but I'm not sure what I'm looking 
for because I'm not sure I understand what is going on.

Here's the web site I'm getting the text from: http://www.qad.com/pl/ 
It doesn't always break (works fine on my Mac) but I have trouble 
copying text from the page and pasting the text into that field on the 
left. Usually it pastes ok, but after submitting the form sometimes the 
text has become transformed when I try to paste it again. By pasting 
again I mean I don't try to copy it again. (I expect the text to be 
mangled by the cgi script and display incorrectly on that results page. 
That is my job to fix, but I can't even get my computer to behave 
simply copying and pasting the text. Makes it really hard to test.).

Any help is appreciated. Most of you all seem to be European so you 
must have some experience you can share. Don't comment on the web 
design of the site unless you are sure that the lack of attention to 
standards is the cause of the problem. I'm not the designer on this 
project.

Thanks so much.
Diane