My new Mac has random characters on Firefox

Question

Hi,
I have a water tank manual on the web in several languages. It renders correctly on Safari but is garbled on Firefox. I checked all the extra languages on Firefox but accented characters are still random.
Here's the English, Spanish, Portuguese and French links to the same page. Any ideas?
http://www.ferrocement.com/tankBook/indici.en.html
http://www.ferrocement.com/tankBook/indici.es.html
http://www.ferrocement.com/tankBook/indici.fr.html
http://www.ferrocement.com/tankBook/indici.pt.html

Answer 1

Your pages are not valid HTML, and Firefox is very rigid about sticking to standards
You cannot just insert Mac characters into a web page and expect them to display properly on other browsers or in other operating systems.
Instead, you must use standard HTML "&#n;" syntax to encode symbols and Greek characters.
For example, to show the symbol for "pi" you can't just type it on your keyboard, but the HTML for your page must use one of the following encodings:
Π - Upper case pi (Π)
π - Lower case pi (π)
Worse than that, you cannot count on all browsers showing characters of the form "&#n;" where n > 255 properly; for example many WIndows and UNIX type faces do not contain glyphs such as pi at all.
For further reference, here are the standard encodings for non-ASCII characters as used in HTML 4.0:
http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/entities/symbols.html