People insist on examples, so here is my page: http://swiftys.org.uk/therules.html
A colleague in China is viewing the page using IE6 any my “
characters are coming out as pair of Chinese glyphs, and taking the
following plain ASCII character with them. The rest of the page is
rendered more or less correctly.
I'd always assumed that things like “ would render correctly under
all circumstances, unless the client didn't have the right font to
display them.
Is this more likely a font issue on the target system or an IE6 problem?
We are obliged to stay on IE6 as some of our corporate applications fail
under IE7.
--
Steve Swift http://www.swiftys.org.uk/swifty.html http://www.ringers.org.uk 24  3867 
Swifty schrieb am 29.10.2008 14:28:
People insist on examples, so here is my page:
http://swiftys.org.uk/therules.html
404 - file not found
--
Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Holger Jeromin
Swifty wrote:
People insist on examples, so here is my page:
http://swiftys.org.uk/therules.html
We'd prefer example rules that result in a 200 OK response. :-)
I guess the correct URL is http://swiftys.org.uk/rules.html
The encoding of the page is not specified in HTTP headers _or_ in a meta
tag. This means that the client must guess, and different browsers will
guess differently. In China, making a guess on an encoding that is widely
used in China is not a bad idea, but it may break Western pages.
Using View/Encoding on IE 7, I tested the page on four Chinese encodings. In
three cases, I saw some Chinese characters in the midst of English texts; in
the fourth, Big5, the page is differently broken (some characters shown as
bullets). This was more or less to be expected.
A colleague in China is viewing the page using IE6 any my “
characters are coming out as pair of Chinese glyphs, and taking the
following plain ASCII character with them. The rest of the page is
rendered more or less correctly.
This matches my test results and strongly suggests that it is an encoding
problem. The quickest fix is to add
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=windows-1252">
I'd always assumed that things like “ would render correctly
under all circumstances, unless the client didn't have the right font
to display them.
More or less so, and the "unless" reservation is rather theoretical. But the
problem is that in the eyes of a browser, or other user agent, your
document's content is unspecified. It is a sequence of bytes (or a sequence
of bits) with no interpretation assigned to them. So why should they think
the document contains characters "&", "l", etc.?
In practice, if your document contained _only_ bytes in the ASCII range,
then the problem probably would not appear, though there is really no
guarantee. Your document contains also curly quotation marks and apostrophes
in windows-1252 (Windows Latin 1) encoding, and since they are outside the
ASCII range, there will be different guesses on what they mean.
Is this more likely a font issue on the target system or an IE6
problem?
Neither.
We are obliged to stay on IE6 as some of our corporate applications
fail under IE7.
Why would that matter to the way you author web pages?
--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
In practice, if your document contained _only_ bytes in the ASCII range,
then the problem probably would not appear, though there is really no
guarantee. Your document contains also curly quotation marks and
apostrophes in windows-1252 (Windows Latin 1) encoding, and since they
are outside the ASCII range, there will be different guesses on what
they mean.
How odd. I edited the source (rules.html, not therules.html, but I've
now created a hard link, so the name is optional) and found some weird
left and right double quote ASCII characters (0x93 and 0x94) in there. I
wouldn't know how to put those in there, so how they got there is a
mystery. I've changed them to “ and ” and I'll ask my
colleague to try again. I've just remembered that I imported the text of
this page from a Powerpoint document, so that probably that's where the
odd characters came from.
>We are obliged to stay on IE6 as some of our corporate applications
fail under IE7.
Why would that matter to the way you author web pages?
My colleague told me that the page rendered correctly in Firefox, and I
had no idea that I'd somehow managed to get weird characters into my
HTML, so my initial reaction was that it might be an IE6 problem. Had
this been the case, I didn't want people telling us to upgrade to IE7,
as that is not an option at the moment.
--
Steve Swift http://www.swiftys.org.uk/swifty.html http://www.ringers.org.uk
Swifty wrote:
How odd. I edited the source (rules.html, not therules.html, but I've
now created a hard link, so the name is optional) and found some weird
left and right double quote ASCII characters (0x93 and 0x94) in
there. I wouldn't know how to put those in there, so how they got
there is a mystery. I've changed them to “ and ” and I'll
ask my colleague to try again. I've just remembered that I imported
the text of this page from a Powerpoint document, so that probably
that's where the odd characters came from.
It's actually relatively simple. Powerpoint, like Microsoft Office software
in general, converts ASCII quotation mark ", U+0022, and Ascii apostrophe ',
U+0027, into language-dependent double and single quotation marks. This is
usually a nice feature, provided that the language setting is correct and
that you take some care in using the text in other contexts.
In particular, if you cut and paste data and save it in "ANSI encoding" (a
Microsoft misnomer for different nonstandard 8-bit encodings), such as
windows-1252 in the Western world, as many programs do by default, they will
usually be automatically convented to that encoding. All is well until the
data is sent to some software without telling the encoding. And even then
things might appear to be OK as long as the software then guesses that the
data is windows-1252 encoded (as most web pages without encoding information
probably are).
If you like you can use “, but it's really simpler to declare the data
as windows-1252 encoded.
--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
On 10/29/2008 10:20 AM, Swifty wrote [in part]:
>
My colleague told me that the page rendered correctly in Firefox, and I
had no idea that I'd somehow managed to get weird characters into my
HTML, so my initial reaction was that it might be an IE6 problem. Had
this been the case, I didn't want people telling us to upgrade to IE7,
as that is not an option at the moment.
Web pages should be written to be viewed with ALL browsers. This
applies to ALL of your Web pages, not merely the one in question. See
<http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/index.htmlfor some design
guidelines in this direction.
More important, however, is that the pages use valid HTML or XHTML.
Your cited page (URL as corrected by Jeromin) has only 4 HTML errors,
much fewer than I usually see when someone has a problem like yours.
Fix those errors and see if that helps resolve your problem.
Firefox might have rendered the page correctly, but that was pure luck.
For whatever afflicts your page, the guess coded into Firefox was
fortuitous for you; and the guess coded into IE was not. In other
cases, IE guesses correctly; but Firefox does not. If there are no HTML
or XHTML errors, there is no guessing.
As for your assertion that "We are obliged to stay on IE6", you have
tied yourself to a falling star. By various measurements, the share of
the browser market held by all versions of IE (including both 6 and 7)
has fallen steadily over the past five years. In 2003, IE might have
held as much as 88% of the market. As of this fall, it holds between
49% and 57%. See my <http://www.rossde.com/internet/browsers.html>.
--
David E. Ross
<http://www.rossde.com/>
Q: What's a President Bush cocktail?
A: Business on the rocks.
On 2008-10-29, David E. Ross <no****@nowhere.notwrote:
On 10/29/2008 10:20 AM, Swifty wrote [in part]:
>>
My colleague told me that the page rendered correctly in Firefox, and I
had no idea that I'd somehow managed to get weird characters into my
HTML, so my initial reaction was that it might be an IE6 problem. Had
this been the case, I didn't want people telling us to upgrade to IE7,
as that is not an option at the moment.
Web pages should be written to be viewed with ALL browsers. This
applies to ALL of your Web pages, not merely the one in question. See
<http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/index.htmlfor some design
guidelines in this direction.
More important, however, is that the pages use valid HTML or XHTML.
Your cited page (URL as corrected by Jeromin) has only 4 HTML errors,
much fewer than I usually see when someone has a problem like yours.
Fix those errors and see if that helps resolve your problem.
Firefox might have rendered the page correctly, but that was pure luck.
For whatever afflicts your page, the guess coded into Firefox was
fortuitous for you; and the guess coded into IE was not. In other
cases, IE guesses correctly; but Firefox does not. If there are no HTML
or XHTML errors, there is no guessing.
There still may be plenty of guessing: the W3C specifications don't
define everything and some things they leave explicitly undefined.
Sometimes they even say the browser is free to make a guess.
But yes, getting rid of all the errors certainly helps a lot and is the
first thing to do.
On 29 Oct, 18:20, Swifty <steve.j.sw...@gmail.comwrote:
I've changed them to “ and ” and I'll ask my
colleague to try again.
So did your colleague (as your original post suggests) try a document
with these _as_entity_references_ and have a problem, or were they
coded as literal characters at the time they reported the problem?
Andy Dingley wrote:
So did your colleague (as your original post suggests) try a document
with these _as_entity_references_ and have a problem, or were they
coded as literal characters at the time they reported the problem?
At the time the problem was initially reported (both *to* me, and *by*
me, here) there were 0x92,0x93 and 0x94 hex values in my HTML, imported
by cut'n'paste from Powerpoint. All I did was add sufficient HTML to get
the formatting roughly right, and I didn't notice the "odd" characters
as *my* browser rendered them correctly.
Then my Chinese colleague reported a formatting problem (in case you're
wondering why I should be discussing the content of that page in a work
context, it is because I give lessons in spoken English, so it doesn't
matter *what* we talk about, as long as it is "interesting" English, and
we'd wandered onto the topic of asking if we are fat, see the 11th rule)
and Jukka was kind enough to point out that my page contained characters
outside the allowed range (my words). I fixed the >0x7f characters,
using entity references where necessary, and my page now formats
perfectly. This may be a strange new use of the word "perfectly" that
you hadn't come across before.
--
Steve Swift http://www.swiftys.org.uk/swifty.html http://www.ringers.org.uk
In article <09******************************@brightview.com >,
Swifty <st***********@gmail.comwrote:
>
Andy Dingley wrote:
So did your colleague (as your original post suggests) try a document
with these _as_entity_references_ and have a problem, or were they
coded as literal characters at the time they reported the problem?
At the time the problem was initially reported (both *to* me, and *by*
me, here) there were 0x92,0x93 and 0x94 hex values in my HTML, imported
by cut'n'paste from Powerpoint. All I did was add sufficient HTML to get
the formatting roughly right, and I didn't notice the "odd" characters
as *my* browser rendered them correctly.
Oddly enough, I experienced a similar problem just today when pasting
some text from a Word document into the "notes" area of a PowerPoint
slide. My version of Word has smart quotes enabled, and the pasted
text included both left and right double quotes. Once in PowerPoint,
I was intrigued to see that the left double quote and first character
immediately following were transformed into a Chinese character, while
the trailing double quote was converted to the "undefined character"
for the font face in use.
In short, beware of "smart quotes" when cutting/pasting!
David Stone wrote:
>
In short, beware of "smart quotes" when cutting/pasting!
I think you should beware of *anything* that calls itself "smart". ;)
--
Berg
In article <no****************************@news1.chem.utoront o.ca>,
David Stone <no******@domain.invalidwrote:
In short, beware of "smart quotes" when cutting/pasting!
The world would be a better place for the near total absence of smart
quotes. They are mostly superfluous trinkets.
--
dorayme
On 10/30/2008 1:21 PM, David Stone wrote:
In article <09******************************@brightview.com >,
Swifty <st***********@gmail.comwrote:
>Andy Dingley wrote:
>>So did your colleague (as your original post suggests) try a document
with these _as_entity_references_ and have a problem, or were they
coded as literal characters at the time they reported the problem?
At the time the problem was initially reported (both *to* me, and *by*
me, here) there were 0x92,0x93 and 0x94 hex values in my HTML, imported
by cut'n'paste from Powerpoint. All I did was add sufficient HTML to get
the formatting roughly right, and I didn't notice the "odd" characters
as *my* browser rendered them correctly.
Oddly enough, I experienced a similar problem just today when pasting
some text from a Word document into the "notes" area of a PowerPoint
slide. My version of Word has smart quotes enabled, and the pasted
text included both left and right double quotes. Once in PowerPoint,
I was intrigued to see that the left double quote and first character
immediately following were transformed into a Chinese character, while
the trailing double quote was converted to the "undefined character"
for the font face in use.
In short, beware of "smart quotes" when cutting/pasting!
See "Watch out for those not-so-smart quotes!", about 1/4 of the way
down the page at <http://webtips.dan.info/char.html>. Also see
"DEMORONISER: Correct Moronic Microsoft HTML" at
<http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/demoroniser/>.
--
David E. Ross
<http://www.rossde.com/>
Q: What's a President Bush cocktail?
A: Business on the rocks.
In article <6m************@mid.individual.net>,
Bergamot <be******@visi.comwrote:
David Stone wrote:
In short, beware of "smart quotes" when cutting/pasting!
I think you should beware of *anything* that calls itself "smart". ;)
Agreed - it's pretty much an automatic oxymoron label...
Swifty <st***********@gmail.comwrites:
dorayme wrote:
>The world would be a better place for the near total absence of
smart quotes. They are mostly superfluous trinkets.
They do, however, allow someone like me to get closer to the
typographical standards set by civilised booksellers, without breaking
out in a sweat. See http://www.swiftys.org.uk/wiz?108 and
http://www.swiftys.org.uk/wiz?456
As usual, I seem to be missing the point. That page has a large and
prominent ' and the quotes seem to use ". There seems to be no
regard for typographical standards.
--
Ben.
In comp.infosystems. www.authoring.html message <09Odnb5UnKxxjZfUnZ2dnUVZ 8o******@brightview.com>, Thu, 30 Oct 2008 19:54:11, Swifty
<st***********@gmail.composted:
>
At the time the problem was initially reported (both *to* me, and *by*
me, here) there were 0x92,0x93 and 0x94 hex values in my HTML, imported
by cut'n'paste from Powerpoint. All I did was add sufficient HTML to
get the formatting roughly right, and I didn't notice the "odd"
characters as *my* browser rendered them correctly.
Program EIGHTBIT, /via/ sig line 3, will scan a file and report
undesirable characters. As the source file is only 24 lines, 665 bytes,
you can read it to see that the program is harmless.
--
(c) John Stockton, nr London UK. ?@merlyn.demon.co.uk DOS 3.3, 6.20; WinXP.
Web <URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/- FAQqish topics, acronyms & links.
PAS EXE TXT ZIP via <URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/programs/00index.htm>
My DOS <URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/batfiles.htm- also batprogs.htm.
Ben Bacarisse wrote:
Swifty <st***********@gmail.comwrites:
>dorayme wrote:
>>The world would be a better place for the near total absence of
smart quotes. They are mostly superfluous trinkets.
They do, however, allow someone like me to get closer to the
typographical standards set by civilised booksellers, without
breaking out in a sweat. See http://www.swiftys.org.uk/wiz?108 and
http://www.swiftys.org.uk/wiz?456
As usual, I seem to be missing the point. That page has a large and
prominent ' and the quotes seem to use ". There seems to be no
regard for typographical standards.
I guess you mean the page originally under discussion http://swiftys.org.uk/rules.html
I have to agree with you.
I'm a bit disappointed that Swifty didn't make the _simple_ correction of
adding a <metatag for the encoding; at present, the document is sent by
the server as lump of octets (bytes) without telling how they be
interpreted, except that they're supposed to constitute an HTML document.
But you can't be an HTML document without being a sequence of _characters_
as opposite to a sequence of octets.
Moreover, mixing "typographers' punctuation" and ASCII punctuation is
generally a typical compromise: it combines the drawbacks of the
alternatives. In addition to ASCII quotes and apostrophes, the page also
uses the hyphen-minus in the role of a dash. When trying to be
typographically (or orthographically) correct, you should use an en dash or
an em dash instead, depending on language and typographic "standard".
Besides, using underlining for emphasis is bad practice in typography and
even worse on web pages, where underlining is generally understood as
indicating a link.
On the other hand, the page content is hilarious.
--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Dr J R Stockton wrote:
Program EIGHTBIT, /via/ sig line 3, will scan a file and report
undesirable characters. As the source file is only 24 lines, 665 bytes,
you can read it to see that the program is harmless.
I'm surprised that my favourite editor doesn't seem to be able to do
this for me, so I've written to the author, hoping that I'm overlooking
something obvious.
As well as making my HTML safer, being able to check for characters
>0x7f would make my programming easier as well, since the language I
use considers anything 0x7f to be an illegal character, apart from
inside literal strings.
--
Steve Swift http://www.swiftys.org.uk/swifty.html http://www.ringers.org.uk
dorayme wrote:
I am a bit worried that you have a house across two countries in case it
is the island of Britain and some other country. I suppose a house
*could* be one with two parts across a sea? I guess the architecture
that would be required to make it an aesthetic whole would have been
expensive.
Here's a hint: One of them is quite close to the "Bridge across the
Atlantic".
--
Steve Swift http://www.swiftys.org.uk/swifty.html http://www.ringers.org.uk
Swifty wrote:
>
Dr J R Stockton wrote:
>Program EIGHTBIT, /via/ sig line 3, will scan a file and report
undesirable characters. As the source file is only 24 lines, 665 bytes,
you can read it to see that the program is harmless.
I'm surprised that my favourite editor doesn't seem to be able to do
this for me, so I've written to the author, hoping that I'm overlooking
something obvious.
Is it by any chance UltraEdit? Because I was about to write them
with the exact same question.
--
Guy Macon
<http://www.GuyMacon.com/>
In comp.infosystems. www.authoring.html message <doraymeRidThis- C2*******************@news-vip.optusnet.com.au>, Fri, 31 Oct 2008
19:18:50, dorayme <do************@optusnet.com.auposted:
>
I am a bit worried that you have a house across two countries in case it
is the island of Britain and some other country. I suppose a house
*could* be one with two parts across a sea? I guess the architecture
that would be required to make it an aesthetic whole would have been
expensive.
Evidently Australia is not what it was. When it was a colony, its
literate residents would have been generally known that Great Britain
comprised three countries : England, Wales and Scotland - and that the
two borders are in parts habitable. And that a substantial part of the
United Kingdom then was the island of Ireland - now, we have a land
border between Northern Ireland and the Republic (also habitable in
parts).
We also have a small dry border (or three) with France, though it's not
a good place to build a house.
--
(c) John Stockton, Surrey, UK. ?@merlyn.demon.co.uk Turnpike v6.05 MIME.
Web <URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/- FAQish topics, acronyms, & links.
Proper <= 4-line sig. separator as above, a line exactly "-- " (SonOfRFC1036)
Do not Mail News to me. Before a reply, quote with ">" or "" (SonOfRFC1036)
In article <2o**************@invalid.uk.co.demon.merlyn.inval id>,
Dr J R Stockton <jr*@merlyn.demon.co.ukwrote:
In comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html message <doraymeRidThis-
C2*******************@news-vip.optusnet.com.au>, Fri, 31 Oct 2008
19:18:50, dorayme <do************@optusnet.com.auposted:
I am a bit worried that you have a house across two countries in case it
is the island of Britain and some other country. I suppose a house
*could* be one with two parts across a sea? I guess the architecture
that would be required to make it an aesthetic whole would have been
expensive.
Evidently Australia is not what it was.
Is this a snooty criticism of me? Yes, when I wrote that, the thought
did cross my mind that no matter how it was put someone would have
something to say about the presuppositions. The main thrust of the
thought was to have a little go at the wanker who boasted about his cars
and houses. Look up "wanker", dear *Dr*, maybe that is an Australian
expression that is part of the common thread over the centuries that
saves us from not being not completely what we were.
When it was a colony, its
literate residents would have been generally known that Great Britain
comprised three countries
When it was a colony, neither the toffs who came out to rule it nor the
nor the convicts nor the aboriginals nor the others would have written a
sentence like yours. So get stuffed.
<g>
--
dorayme
On 2008-10-31, Dr J R Stockton <jr*@merlyn.demon.co.ukwrote:
Evidently Australia is not what it was. When it was a colony, its
literate residents would have been generally known that Great Britain
comprised three countries : England, Wales and Scotland - and that the
two borders are in parts habitable.
On behalf of Australia I rise up and smite you across the cheeks with a
Vegemite sanger for your impertinence .....
Andrew
--
echo 'h************@tznvy.pbz' | \
tr 'A-M N-Z a-m n-z' 'N-Z A-M n-z a-m'
Guy Macon wrote:
Is it by any chance UltraEdit? Because I was about to write them
with the exact same question.
No, so go for it!
For the record, I'm not going to name the editor in public until its
author has had a chance either to show me where I missed the function,
or promises to add it in some future release.
--
Steve Swift http://www.swiftys.org.uk/swifty.html http://www.ringers.org.uk This thread has been closed and replies have been disabled. Please start a new discussion. Similar topics
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