Generally the page's encoding is followed, unless the server specifies an encoding. As the <meta> tag seems to specify what you're expecting, and as manually switching to that value helps, it sounds like the server you're getting the page from is sending an incorrect encoding (Windows-1252) in the headers to the browser.
The proper way to fix it is to configure the server properly. For a company webserver, this probably means bugging the server admin to do it.
To see the (wrong) headers, if you're familiar with such tools, you can use things like Firebug's "Net" panel in Firefox, or Web Inspector's "Resources" panel in Chrome or Safari. Or, if you don't know these tools and the web site is publicly accessible, then you easily see the server's headers online using, for example, Web-Sniffer.
Assuming the login page specifies the same as the actual pages, then this yields:
Content-Type: text/html
...without any value for charset. Not sure if a browser should then still interpret that <meta> tag, but apparently Firefox is ignoring it, and making some best guess.
Firefox ignoring it might be caused by the HTML source. The <meta> tag should always be specified within <head> before anything else, as it might also apply to the title, scripts, CSS and so on. On this site, it doesn't and, even worse, the HTML is a total mess:
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=JavaScript SRC="/dergi/_ScriptLibrary/pm.js"></SCRIPT>
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=JavaScript>
thisPage._location = "/dergi/giris/login.asp";
</SCRIPT>
<FORM name=thisForm METHOD=post>
<HTML>
<style type="text/css">
<!--
[..]
-->
</style>
<HEAD>
[..]
<META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-TYPE" CONTENT="TEXT/HTML; CHARSET=WINDOWS-1254">
<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Microsoft FrontPage 5.0">
<META NAME="AUTHOR" CONTENT="[removed to protect the innocent...]">
<TITLE>YAYSAT DERGİ RAPORLARI</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<center>
[..]
</center>
</body>
<INPUT type=hidden name="_method">
<INPUT type=hidden name="_thisPage_state" value="">
</FORM>
</html>
Huge developer fail.
(Incidentally, Web-Sniffer shows <meta http-equiv=content-type content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">, but that is due to its values for Accept-Charset. Firebug shows <META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-TYPE" CONTENT="TEXT/HTML; CHARSET=WINDOWS-1254"> just like in the question.)
0096 is most likely an ASCII reference to the ' char which can be displayed within HTML as `
Looking at your link however the HTML looks normal and there is no reference to –
...
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...
Firefox should have no issues displaying the dash glyph as I just tested on 3.6.*...
<html>
<head>
<body>
My dash is –
</body>
</head>
</html>
...copy and paste the above code in a test document and name it test.html and open it up in Firefox. It should display your dash without any problems.
EDIT: As pointed out by Dave 0x96 is the ANSI equivalent of en dash. With this understanding it appears that this is a parsing issue with regards to the doctype specifiction within the page itself. Check out this thread.
You could extract the HTML and modify the doctype to see if this indeed where the issue is stemming from. It is most likely a cross between encoded values ie...ANSI -> Unicode; as Unicode the value is a non-printable char.
Best Answer
In firefox, use
View->Character Encoding->More Encodings->UTF-16.
Hope that helps.
Most computer text is encoded as either
asciior 8-bit Unicode (UTF-8)For more info on UTF-16 specifically, check here.
In general, if you see the
�in firefox, use some "intelligent guessing" and try changing character encodings. Usually this works, occasionally though, particularly with linux firefox, you may run into font issues.