Layer messes up other text on screen

That's crazy man!  Just plain weird.

Um... hm... erm...

What the browser's encoding set to (language)?  Are you putting different text encodings into the layer then what is in the main document?

The encoding is set as follows:
<%@ page errorPage="SimpleErrorPage.jsp"
contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8"session="true"
buffer="1kb"%>
The layer is very simple :
<LAYER id="errorMessage" align="left" style="width:600px; position:relative; visibility: hidden "> </LAYER>

Then I write html to the layer from javascript as follows :

document.errorMessage.document.open();    
               document.errorMessage.document.write("<table border='0' cellspacing='0' cellpadding='0' width='585' summary='This table is used for layout only.'><tr><td><br></td></tr><tr><td><font color='#FF0000'><getString:getString stringId="duplicationerror"/></font></td></tr></table>");
               document.errorMessage.document.close();                    
               document.errorMessage.visibility = 'show';

The encoding is set as follows:
<%@ page errorPage="SimpleErrorPage.jsp"
contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8"session="true"
buffer="1kb"%>
The layer is very simple :
<LAYER id="errorMessage" align="left" style="width:600px; position:relative; visibility: hidden "> </LAYER>

Then I write html to the layer from javascript as follows :

document.errorMessage.document.open();    
               document.errorMessage.document.write("<table border='0' cellspacing='0' cellpadding='0' width='585' summary='This table is used for layout only.'><tr><td><br></td></tr><tr><td><font color='#FF0000'><getString:getString stringId="duplicationerror"/></font></td></tr></table>");
               document.errorMessage.document.close();                    
               document.errorMessage.visibility = 'show';

Removing it altogether doesn't fix it. Ho do I set the layer to use a specific encoding ?
Thanks
Spunog

Removing it altogether doesn't fix it. Ho do I set the layer to use a specific encoding ?
Thanks
Spunog

You can place header information into a layer, although I will have to double check to see if there is a more "proper" way.

Is this whole page being generated by a scripting language, or just your header information?  Try placing everything in a flat .html, with no code other then JavaScript, and see what happens.

Does that layer and/or main document contain any Unicode characters?

Is a layer treated as a totaly separate html source , therefore the meta tags on the page are not available to the layer ? sound crazy ?

The ISO-8859-1  works fine but unfortunately it must be UTF-8 . So I need to know how to set the charset of a layer.

try:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE='JavaScript'>
theObj = getElementById('layername');
theObj.setAttribute('encoding', 'UTF-8');
</SCRIPT>

... this is assuming your using Gecko (Mozilla or Navigator 6+).  I am not sure if IE actually supports the standardized DOM yet.

I'm not sure if "encoding" is the right either.  Try "charset" too if it doesn work.  I'll have to do some more digging to figure out if an Element even has the appropriate attribute.

So should that be put within the layer tags ??

No.

Try it at the bottom of your document, to make sure everything has loaded.

This actually worked but not for me in the way I needed. The problem was that Netscape does not like document.write to a layer or whatever so I made a bunch of em with all possible text and basically just hide em or make em appear when appropriate. Thanks a lot buddy you have been very helpfull.....
Spunog