Have you set the right Default Font for that Encoding/Character Set?
Do you even have the right fonts installed on your computer?
Note: Some web pages ask you to keep your browser on the Western (or Western European or Latin-1) Encoding setting, and then they provide you with a special font which assigns characters from their own alphabet (or syllabary or other writing system). You might have to set that special font as the default font for the Western Encoding. This usually happens with languages or writing systems that are not specifically supported by both Netscape and Internet Explorer. The Unicode encoding standard does support many of these languages (and Netscape and Internet Explorer do support Unicode), but Unicode fonts weren't readily, or cheaply, available at the time most of those sites were created, and they still aren't available or easily employable for many languages, and that's why they continue to use their own encoding set-ups.
Ultimately -- that is, in the end, in the near future, hopefully -- these technical issues will disappear with the universal implementation of a Unicode-like encoding standard. If all the web pages, all the word-processing programs, all the browsers, and all the fonts in the world were fully compliant with an encoding standard such as Unicode, nearly all the written characters ever used (that is, nearly all languages and writing systems, past and present) would be displayable even on a single page without any special effort by the person reading it.
If it were certain that every person reading this page right now were using a Unicode capable browser and fully compliant Unicode fonts, this page would've been encoded in Unicode, and no-one would have noticed or known the difference. But to ensure maximal readability, things being as they are, this page had to be written using the default encoding most English language browsers use. (Actually, this page is now encoded in Unicode, for the sake of web-site consistency. But, since this page is written in English, and with no foreign characters, it will display almost identically as it would without Unicode -- the difference being determined mostly by your default browser settings, and also, for some reason, on the difference in the way your browser may display even the same font when using different encodings.)
The fact is, that the latest Netscape and Internet Explorer browser versions ARE already able to read Unicode encoded pages correctly, but they do not come with the fonts needed to display correctly, and Netscape and Microsoft don't tell you where or how to obtain them, or how to find out if you already have Unicode fonts on your computer. Yet, there ARE fonts easily available even on the internet. And for free! Or nearly for free! Below, you can find links to these Unicode fonts, as well as links to more information about Unicode.
UNICODE
To view any of the links below, you need to have a Unicode font.
One, called Code2000, is available at the first link below.
About UNICODE:
. Unicode Support in Your Browser New Address.
. Unicode and multilingual support in Web browsers and HTML
. Unicode and multilingual support in Web browsers and HTML New Address.
. Setting up Windows Internet Explorer 5.5 for Multilingual and Unicode Support
. Setting up Windows Internet Explorer 5.5 for Multilingual and Unicode Support New Address.
. Unicode's characters
. Fonts for the Unicode Character Set
. Unicode test page
. Roadmap to Unicode
. Roadmap to Plane 0 (BMP) of ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode old name of page above
Unicode repertoires by code-block:
. TITUS Is Testing Unicode Scriptmanagement
. Unicode test files
Unicode repertoires by language, language group, or script group:
. Unicode and multilingual support in Web browsers and HTML
. Unicode and multilingual support in Web browsers and HTML New Address.
. Liste des noms des caractères de l'ISO 10646-1 (French)
. Liste des noms des caractères de l'ISO 10646-1 (French) New address.
. TITUS Is Testing Unicode Scriptmanagement
Unicode samplers: pages displaying a mix of characters from different writing systems:
. A Unicode Test Page
this page now requires a Numeric Character Reference (NCR) capable browser.
. Script sampler
. Script Links and Test Pages New Address.
. UTF-8 Test Page
. UTF-8 Test1
. UTF-8 Sampler
. Tenth International Unicode Conference - Languages
. Tenth International Unicode Conference - Unicode UTF-8
. Tenth International Unicode Conference - Unicode NCRs
. Decimal addresses for Phonetic Symbols in Unicode
. UTF-8 test New.