....but Firefox does. this is the page: http://shiinaringo.se/guestbook.php You can see that a lot of characters (Swedish, Japanese) are totally garbled when using IE. Works fine in FF. If you try to look at some of the other pages linked to in the menu, they will work with IE as well. So I just don't know what is the problem with this one page. All pages on this site includes a header file which starts with: ---cut--- <?php echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>';?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" " http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html> <head> <meta name="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> ---cut--- Which means that in my view I tell the browser through the meta tag which charset is used (UTF-8). However IE doesn't seem to give a damn about this. I'm pulling my hair. :-(