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Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 12/20/05 17:28
On Tue, 20 Dec 2005, Mark Parnell wrote:
> Deciding to do something for the good of humanity, diablo
> <diablo@noplace.com> spouted in alt.html:
>
> > Now on some pages the pound £ is displayed but on others it comes
> > out as a '?'
>
> £
Well, yes, that rates to solve the immediate problem; but the
immediate problem looks to me to be a symptom of a failure to properly
specify the character encoding (charset= attribute) of the page in
question. Unless and until that fault is addressed, the original
poster must expect to get analogous problems in other places too, into
the future.
I note that the original poster said elsewhere that:
> > By the way this only happens in Firefox - it is ok in IE
This is always a Big Red Warning Sign. IE has a dirty habit of doing
what it guesses the author intended, instead of doing what the author
actually asked for. As such, IE should NEVER, repeat *NEVER*, be used
as any kind of test for correctness. Mozilla (or firefox if that be
your preference), on the other hand, does what it is told, rather than
what it guesses it ought to have been told instead. Bottom line:
design it for the WWW, make it work with Mozilla first, and then
verify that MSIE also gets it right. Never vice versa. This cannot
be stressed too strongly, IMHO.
I think it's fair to say that MSIE is the only browser(-like object)
that feels it can ride roughshod over the interworking rules in this
way. Some other browsers do have various kinds of error fixup behind
the scenes, but, if you don't make any errors, those fixups should
never be provoked. To put it in different words: design first for
the WWW (with the limitations of MSIE in mind), as part of your basic
structural design. Verify with actual browsers (and particularly with
MSIE) afterwards, as part of your quality control measures. Muddling
these two aspects of web design, i.e fiddling around until the page
merely looks right on a browser or two, is no substitute for knowing
what you're doing.
YMMV, IMHO and bar. hth.
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