Boss, I Just Had an Apostrophe!

[akirlu]

But James Wolcott hasn't. Is it just me, or does everyone get weird Old Norse phonetic characters instead of ordinary punctuation marks when viewing James Wolcott's blog?

Comments

[davidschroth.livejournal.com]

It's not just you.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

I don't get Old Norse characters. I've got € all over the place, though ;)

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Can't say for everyone, but I get odd things where punctuation ought to be.

TK

[sraun]

Me too! I'm getting Euro symbols, and the Windows character-set TM symbol, and lower-case a with the ^ mark. And an 'oe' character.

[scottscidmore.livejournal.com]

It’s, sorry, it's in the page source that way so he must have edited as such; possibly a word processor export failure.

[ckd]

He's dumped UTF-8 into a page claiming to be ISO-8859-1 according to the source. When I saved a copy locally and changed the charset parameter, then loaded it back into Safari, it looked fine.

[blufive.livejournal.com]

His web server, and the page, are telling the world that the source uses the ISO-8859-1 character encoding, but bits of it are actually in the UTF-8 character encoding.

If you're really fussed, in Firefox use view->character encoding->Unicode (UTF-8) to read it. Remember to change back to your previous setting afterwards. The corresponding IE setting is similarly-named.

[Apologies to those to who would understand the above better if I wrote it in Martian. It's all to to with the fine details of how an upper case letter "A" is actually stream of ones and zeros as far as computers are concerned. This article explains some of the issues involved. I spent all afternoon explaining a variant of this issue to colleagues, and once per day is quite enough, I'm afraid]

[pnh.livejournal.com]

He's just now acknowledged the problem and says he'll try to get it fixed.

this often happens when people use variant OS

[bellatrys.livejournal.com]

or some sort of EZ-lite software to do their HTML instead of a standard interface - MS Word makes some of the most hideously buggy, garbage-bloated code I've ever seen, bar none, and anytime I have to recode a Word page it makes me want to do painful things to the person who couldn't just send me a text document for a plain-text file, but no, had to turn it into a worthless HTML file via Word because they couldn't be bothered to ask what the best format was, snarl, mutter --

Macs also use a different set of key-codes for special characters by default, and yes, technically, ' and " aren't special characters, but many typesetting programs use "smart quotes" aka "curly quotes" and this makes them into special charas, and if you aren't careful (incl. using 'preview' function, with several different browsers) you will see the raw code instead of the “ ” or ’ instead of " " and ', if that makes it any clearer...