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d0ubled0wn · May 23, 2005, 08:45 PM

I'm getting this on some web sites:

Here's the web page
http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2005/...31091044.shtml

Not sure if it's a problem with my system or the web page. Seems like it started when I installed Tiger.

SMacTech · May 23, 2005, 09:06 PM

I have seen the same thing too. Only it certain posts.

ManOfSteal · May 23, 2005, 09:10 PM

Seems to be an encoding issue according to other threads on this topic.

d0ubled0wn · May 23, 2005, 09:11 PM

After Tiger? I don't remember seeing these in Panther.

ManOfSteal · May 23, 2005, 09:51 PM

Originally Posted by d0ubled0wn

After Tiger? I don't remember seeing these in Panther.

Can't answer for sure, but I believe so yes.

jszrules · May 23, 2005, 10:16 PM

I remember seeing this discussed in another thread, and yes it is a Text Encoding issue. If you go to View-->Text Encoding and select "Western (ISO Latin 1)" instead of "Default" it will fix the problem.

What doesn't make sense is that my Safari Preferences say my Default Encoding is already set to "Western (ISO Latin 1)". So I don't understand why having to change it under the View menu would make any difference...but it does.

TETENAL · May 23, 2005, 11:36 PM

Originally Posted by jszrules

What doesn't make sense is that my Safari Preferences say my Default Encoding is already set to "Western (ISO Latin 1)". So I don't understand why having to change it under the View menu would make any difference...but it does.

The default only applies to web-sites that fail to declare their character encoding. View source on the macrumors site and you'll see:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

So this site claims to be encoded in UTF-8. So Safari respects that and displays the text as if it were UTF-8 encoded.
However that particular post of the site is apparently ISO-Latin1 encoded as can be verified by switching to ISO Latin 1 by hand. This is a bug in the web-site.

moonmonkey · May 24, 2005, 12:36 AM

Originally Posted by d0ubled0wn

After Tiger? I don't remember seeing these in Panther.

Yes, its Tiger only.

jszrules · May 24, 2005, 01:47 AM

Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but don't the following two statements contradict each other:

Originally Posted by moonmonkey

Yes, its Tiger only.

Originally Posted by TETENAL

This is a bug in the web-site.

If it's a bug in the website then what does a change in the Operating System have to do with it? Why didn't we see these weird characters in Panther, Jaguar, etc.?

Chuckit · May 24, 2005, 01:58 AM

It can be both a bug in the Web site and only show up in later versions of a product. There are many Web sites with bugs that don't show up in Internet Explorer precisely because it's broken and they're written to take advantage of that brokenness.

I don't have my Panther computer in front of me, but I believe Panther just didn't display anything there, while Tiger displays a sort of "this character ain't real" glyph (the right behavior, I think).

TETENAL · May 24, 2005, 03:17 AM

Originally Posted by jszrules

If it's a bug in the website then what does a change in the Operating System have to do with it? Why didn't we see these weird characters in Panther, Jaguar, etc.?

The site never displays correctly. I don't have Panther available here, but if you look at it with Firefox you see that it doesn't display the "®" character too. Just that Firefox displays a large white space, so it isn't as obvious. Safari shows the unkown character symbol. Maybe in Panther it did show nothing as well. But the fact remains it is a bug in the web-site that makes it look wrong everywhere. It has nothing to do with Tiger or Safari.

d.fine · May 24, 2005, 05:19 AM

I've seen these characters in MacNN posts and sigs...

Peabo · May 24, 2005, 05:31 AM

look at my sig

d.fine · May 24, 2005, 06:09 AM

Originally Posted by z0ne81

look at my sig

it's full of them!!!

Peabo · May 24, 2005, 06:19 AM

it's meant to be the little bullet point (alt-8) •••

TETENAL · May 24, 2005, 06:49 AM

Originally Posted by z0ne81

it's meant to be the little bullet point (alt-8) •••

You need to re-type them in your signature. This forum was switched from ISO Latin1 to UTF-8 some time ago and now claims to be UTF-8 encoded, but your signature is still ISO Latin1 from the days before the switch.

Peabo · May 24, 2005, 12:34 PM

k, I fixed it!

tom@bluesky.org · May 24, 2005, 03:31 PM

Safari's behavior has changed. Before Tiger, when set to UTF-8, Latin-1 encoded special characters just disappeared, and so many users never noticed. With Tiger, more correctly, they are replaced by the question mark in a diamond symbol, meaning essentially "illegal code."

If the forum has its charset set to UTF-8, you should not wind up with these, except when someone copy/pastes Latin-1 stuff instead of inputting directly, or messages posted back when the forums used Latin-1 instead.

Cadaver · May 24, 2005, 07:09 PM

Yeah, its really annoying. I find myself having to switch the encoding manually (between ISO Latin and UTF-8) to display either certain messages on this forum correctly, or on other websites like the one linked in the first post.

I'm thinking that Safari 2.0 Tiger no longer correctly selects the proper text encoding. Never had such problem on 10.3.x.

tom@bluesky.org · May 24, 2005, 07:21 PM

Originally Posted by Cadaver

I'm thinking that Safari 2.0 Tiger no longer correctly selects the proper text encoding. Never had such problem on 10.3.x.

Not true. Tiger Safari follows the page encoding exactly like in Panther with no problems. It is just that now you see any errors in very stark fashion, while in Panther Safari they were often essentially invisible (e.g. a missing bullet, etc).