HTML question

[rm]

- Freaky control characters showing up in Firefox on Macs.
- They show up on nothing else -- not in Safari, not on PCs.

What the hell should I be looking for that will make this stop?

Comments

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

Apparently FF and Safari use two different character sets as their defaults: Firefox uses Western (ISO-8859-1), and Safari (and probably others) use Western (ISO Latin 1). I don't know if ISO-8859-1 is more restrictive than Latin 1, but it might explain the discrepancy in how accents and other characters are rendered.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Wow. Learn something new you never wanted to know every day.

Oi.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Surely that would take it from the system default character set?

[sethg]

Latin-1 and ISO-8859-1 are the same thing.

However, the default character set on English-language Windows systems is Windows-1252, which is almost like Latin-1 except that in some places where Latin-1 has control characters, Windows-1252 has curly quotes (“”), long dashes, and other visible characters. The Web is so full of pages that represent themselves as Latin-1 (or even ASCII) and are actually coded in Windows-1252 that some browsers have just thrown in the towel and treat all these pages as Windows-1252. grumble grumble grumble Microsoft hegemony grumble grumble.

(which of course may have nothing to do with the OP's problem.)

[browneyedgirl65.livejournal.com]

In particular, mac made some different decisions with respect to the general issue of rendering non-standard characters. These decisions are not outside the scope of the relevant standards because there's some room for interpretation. Anyway, browsers on macintosh will simply handle some of these characters differently. It's easy enough to put out html and encodings that will work properly on both once you understand this issue. html entities are the safest; unicode encodings are also good to go. For your purposes the entities should be just fine.