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

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

In case it's not clear from what other people have said:

Use this table or something like it. Notorious offenders: ampersand, smart quotes (right and left "angled" quote marks), accented letters, everything after ASCII 122.

[sethg]

The "code charts" on the Unicode Web site provide the ultimate reference for this kind of thing. For example, this table shows (most of) the characters from the Zapf Dingbats font that have been incorporated into the Unicode standard; if you want to include a little scissors on your page then you can represent it in HTML with ✂ to get ✂.

(Of course if the person reading your page doesn't have a font with that character on his or her computer then it will show up as a funny block instead of a scissors--but memory and disk space are so cheap these days that most operating systems come with fonts that cover the majority of the Unicode space.)