Encoding (non)issues

[Chris Vogel]

Although this forum declares its character set as ISO 8859-1, it instead seems to be using windows-1252, which is basically ISO 8859-1 with some control characters replaced with displayable ones. Below are the displayable characters that are part of windows-1252 but not ISO 8859-1:

€‚ƒ„…†‡ˆ‰Š‹ŒŽ‘’“”•–—˜™š›œžŸ

Those characters should be escaped in the source code, but they are not. Documents should not contain characters outside their character sets, although I’ll admit that, since this is a common error, most browsers will just treat ISO 8859-1 as windows-1252 anyway. I’m just being pedantic, I suppose.

Characters outside both ISO 8859-1 and windows-1252 seem to be escaped as expected (歯ブラシ, for example).

Archived topic from Anythingforums, old topic ID:3179, old post ID:58518

[michaelk1993adg]

what?


Archived topic from Anythingforums, old topic ID:3179, old post ID:58540

[Red Squirrel]

I noticed lot of sites have screwed up encoding. I have yet to figure out how to make Firefox force it to iso-8859. The problem is only visible on pages with french characters, they'll apear as a diamond.

Pictures are also screwed up on this board, have no idea what causes that one.

Archived topic from Anythingforums, old topic ID:3179, old post ID:58548

[Chris Vogel]

I have yet to figure out how to make Firefox force it to iso-8859.

As a Web author or a Web user? If you want your pages to be served as ISO 8859-1, you would make sure Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 is in your HTTP headers and <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> is in your HTML, but that character set is usually the default anyway. If you want to force a different character set on a page you’re browsing in Firefox, you would go to View → Character Encoding → Western (ISO-8859-1).

I don’t know of a way to turn Firefox’s error correction off and treat ISO 8859-1 like, well, ISO 8859-1 instead of windows-1252, but that shouldn’t matter since the ISO 8859-1 characters that don’t correspond to the ones in windows-1252 can’t be used in HTML anyway. The problem arises when you use the new displayable characters in windows-1252 but serve the document as ISO 8859-1 and then rely on browsers to treat it as windows-1252 despite having declared it as something else. Browsers are not obligated to do that, and using those code points in ISO 8859-1 will make your HTML invalid.

The problem is only visible on pages with french characters, they'll apear as a diamond.

Do you have an example? ISO 8859-1 mostly supports French, but it lacks single guillemets, the OE/oe ligature, the capital Y with diaeresis, and the euro sign. (Of course, those are available via HTML entities.)

Pictures are also screwed up on this board, have no idea what causes that one.

Yeah, it just happened out of the blue. Maybe it was something we said?



Now I’ve come to a dilemma: Do I stop trying to be so typographically correct and dump my curly quotes and dashes, or do I ignore the problem?

Archived topic from Anythingforums, old topic ID:3179, old post ID:58561