Novell NETWARE 6-DOCUMENTATION Manual page 2148

During indexing, if a document contains characters not supported by the
designated encoding, if the document doesn't have an encoding designation,
or if the designation is inaccurate, the indexer will do its best to recover. But
if it cannot, it might index the information incorrectly or quit indexing that
page entirely.
When reading a template file, Web Search might automatically cease
processing the file if it contains any characters not supported by the current
encoding. It will try to ignore the invalid text and continue, but this might not
be possible.
When displaying search results or when printing HTML content, any
character that does not match the specified response encoding will receive a
question mark (?) in its place when rendered at the browser. Although some
characters are properly supported by the current encoding, the browser might
not have the required fonts to display the characters. In this case, users might
see square boxes representing these characters. This is an indication that the
valid character reached the browser, but the operating system could not
provide a font to properly render the character. The user would than have to
either change fonts or install the correct fonts in order to properly display the
characters.
HINT:
If a document does not contain a CHARSET encoding value, the default
encoding for HTML documents is ISO-8859-1, also known as Latin1. The default
encoding for plain text documents is US-ASCII.
Web Search also allows administrators to define the default encodings for
templates, HTML content when printing, and search and print responses.
Refer to the NetWare Web Manager Help for information about changing the
default encodings.
Template Encodings
All HTML documents should include a Content-Type META tag identifying
their character set encodings. The character set encoding allows HTML Web
clients (or browsers) to understand the contents of the file. This tag is also used
by browsers to automatically switch their display system and fonts to correctly
show the Web page's contents. This lets users surf the World Wide Web
without having to constantly change their display system as they encounter
content from various languages and characters sets.
However, because NetWare Web Search lets administrator specify both
template encodings and response encodings, browsers might get confused
when presented with the valid response encoding in the HTTP header and one
Internationalizing Your Search Solution 219