Displaying Greek characters in Web browsers

Using a text editor such as e.g. BBedit 8.0.2, an entity such as α can be converted to the unicode representation using the Markup/Tidy/Convert to XHTML option in the program.

1. The following characters are utf-8 encoded Greek: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, nu, pi, degree (of temperature):
   α, β, γ, δ, Δ, ν, π, °.

   The characters only appear as greek within a browser if:

   • the server (in this case Apache 2.0.49) has the line in the httpd.conf file commented out:
     #AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1
   • or this variable is set to
     AddDefaultCharset utf-8
   • or the file has the suffix utf8 added to its name on the server.

   These solutions may well be server specific. For discussion of this point, see http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2003Sep/0176.html

2. These characters are created using entities such as: α,β,γ,δ,Δ,ν,π, ° and appear as
   α, β, γ, δ, Δ, ν, π, °
   For a complete list of entities, see http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/sgml/entities.html. A more friendly tabulation can be found here. Browser tests to be found here.

Displaying Greek characters in RSS Feeds

Because RSS is an XML document supporting a specific schema, using entities (i.e. β) by default will produce invalid (RSS) XML. The utf-8 method is at the moment the only method (known to me) for incorporating Greek into RSS feeds. Check this out at http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/motm/index-utf.rss (under the mauveine item). The RSS viewer e.g. http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/ displays the character correctly. CMLRSS viewers such as JMol do not yet display unicode characters correctly.