As a web developer, one of the more annoying things about forms is the validation part. Luckily there’s jquery-validate which makes validating forms as easy as just adding a simple class to an input field that needs validation.

However, during one of my latest projects I discovered that under certain conditions, jquery-validate doesn’t play nicely with Internet Explorer 6. By the time you will read this, things might have changed, but the issue I had was that no form validation was done at all.

After some Googling, it turned out the problem is caused by the fact that jquery-validate is encoded as ISO-8859-1. Since the page itself was using UTF-8, and Internet Explorer 6 seems to assume all scripts without a proper encoding defined must be using the same encoding as the page, this caused the validation to stop working.

The solution is simple however. You just need to change the line where jquery-validate is loaded :

<script src="jquery.validate.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

and add the proper encoding by adding charset=”iso-8859-1″ to the script tag :

<script src="jquery.validate.js" 
type="text/javascript" charset="iso-8859-1"></script>