Re: [WSG] Strange character encoding issue

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 09:14:38 -0800

Never had a problem with character encodings on web pages, but since I reinstalled the OS on my iMac I have had an issue.
Some of my characters, especially when using ' seem to mess up. This is the page, content and layout are simple as it's for a uni assignment: <http://mi-linux.wlv.ac.uk/~0802390/overview.html>http://mi-linux.wlv.ac.uk/~0802390/overview.html 


Check out the overview.html page, and notice the 
issues. There is one noticeable in the overview 
page "⤗SOAP⤁"


Any ideas?


(for those interested I do plan to publish a 
website regarding the Semantic Web shortly).



James,


Running your page through the W3 Validator 
(validator.w3.org) gives the following response:



Error line 57, Column 20: non 
SGML character number 
145.



        the keyword 
ëSOAPí in a search 
engine will return 
results	



You have used an illegal character in your text. 
HTML uses the standard UNICODE Consortium 
(http://www.unicode.org/) character repertoire, 
and it leaves undefined (among others) 65 
character codes (0 to 31 inclusive and 127 to 159 
inclusive) that are sometimes used for 
typographical quote marks and similar in 
proprietary character sets. The validator has 
found one of these undefined characters in your 
document. The character may appear on your 
browser as a curly quote, or a trademark symbol, 
or some other fancy glyph; on a different 
computer, however, it will likely appear as a 
completely different character, or nothing at all.



Your best bet is to replace the character with 
the nearest equivalent ASCII character, or to use 
an appropriate character entity 
(http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html3/latin1.html).



For more information on Character Encoding on the 
web, see Alan Flavell's excellent  HTML Character 
Set Issues</a> reference 
(http://web.archive.org/web/20060425191748/ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/).


End of quote.


I always recommend people use UTF-8 because it's 
a much larger character set than ISO-8859-1. I 
also recommend use of XHTML Transitional rather 
than HTML DTD's.



On a side note, I like your page, very 
attractive. But I found the 1, 2, 3, ... buttons 
at the top confusing because I kept trying to 
click the number. Then I tried clicking the blue 
text, both of which produced nothing. Finally my 
cursor wandered over the black text and I 
realized it was the link. Perhaps underlining 
that link or making it dynamic like the button 
would prevent the confusion I encountered. On the 
other hand, perhaps I just need another cup of 
coffee!


Peace,

-Tim



--
<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>
       Tim Offenstein  ***  Campus Accessibility Liaison  ***  (217) 244-2700
            CITES Departmental Services  ***  www.uiuc.edu/goto/offenstein
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