Daniel R. Tobias wrote: > barney wrote: >> http://www.everywine.co.uk/preston17/brownbros/BBgift.html >> >> When this page is first loaded, it's usually layed out all wrong. Hit >> Reload, and the layout fixes itself for the most part, but the >> stylesheet isn't applied. I didn't see anything in the source code that >> might cause this odd rendering, then I looked at the Page Info and >> Character Encoding UTF-16LE caught my eye. There isn't any charset >> coded in the page itself, so I guess this is coming from the server. > > I checked, and there isn't any charset in the server response either; > try this HTTP response checker: > http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html > > Mozilla seems to be guessing the character encoding from the data > itself (which seems to be in a 16-bit encoding, since there are null > bytes in between 8-bit characters). But sometimes it gets out of sync > in processing the multibyte characters, and things get messed up. > When I try it, the link URLs in the status bar show up in Chinese or > something, and sometimes part of the page text also looks Chinese. > > I remember encountering the same effect a few days ago on another > page, which was also sent in 16-bit coding but with no charset HTTP > header. That one did have a META tag with a charset header (an > inferior way to specify a character set over using true HTTP headers, > since it's uncertain whether the browser can even parse the META tags > in the first place if it doesn't know what character encoding it's > in), but it was an incorrect charset (it said UTF-8). > > Mozilla appears to do some character-set-sniffing of its own, > overriding the actually specified charset, but sometimes messes up, I > guess. I don't know if it would still mess up like this if the > charset were correctly specified. > >
Thanks for the detailed explanation. Now I know what to look for in the future. Sounds like it's partly mozilla's fault and partly an evangelism bug. If the nulls weren't there, mozilla wouldn't have a problem with it. Guess I get on the webmaster's back next. :)
