Fix for Collage 5.1 Content Contributor and Special Characters

For those who have tried and tried again to get special characters to display using UTF-8 using the Content Contributor I have a very small update to the Serena KB57017 article.

They do tell you to put the following line in the edit_layout [or Masterpage if the edit layout is using one]:

<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

Which a lot of my clients do, however, most of my clients also want to be XHTML 1.0 compliant which means that this tag would have to be lowercase, have all of its attribute values in double quotation marks as well as close itself at the end.  So, with a valid XHTML meta tag, the special characters still turned in ? [question marks].

The solution in detail:  As long as you put that code as is - meaning not XHTML valid, it will actually work.  So far, in our testing we have discovered that you can leave a validly-written <meta/> tag like so:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8"/>

in the masterpage of the deploy layout and even the edit layout [should it have one applied] and as long as you paste the above code in [case sensitive] the <head/> section of the edit layout your special characters should work just fine.  As long as your deploy layout and/or masterpage have the correctly written <meta/> tags your pages should validate just fine as well.

We are assuming that their contributor parser is actually looking for this string with the case above.  Silly, but at least we know how to work around it.