Why can't firefox display text correctly?

September 27, 2006 10:35 AM

Why can't firefox display some punctuation characters correctly?

It doesn't happen on every site, but it does happen on more than just one. Here's an example from today's NYT:

Excerpts released Tuesday show that intelligence agencies found that the ?Iraq conflict has become the ?cause c?l?bre? for jihadists.?

Here's how it's supposed to look:

Excerpts released Tuesday show that intelligence agencies found that the “Iraq conflict has become the ‘cause célèbre’ for jihadists.”

IE renders the text correctly, so it's not a windows problem. I figure it's some sort of character encoding issue. The source for the page says:

<meta http-equiv="charset" content="iso-8859-1" />

and I've got Firefox's character encoding set to "Western (ISO-8859-1)".

posted by Gamblor to computers & internet (11 comments total)

For what it's worth, that line in that page displays correctly on firefox on my machine, and the default character encoding is set to the same thing as yours. Have you changed the font or anything? (Not all fonts have all the characters. Mine is left at the default Times New Roman).
posted by -harlequin- at 10:49 AM on September 27, 2006

Firefox tends to follow standards strictly, while IE is full of hacks to correct common mistakes.

I notice that the NYT has corrected their page (At least it appears that way when I view it in ff).
posted by MonkeySaltedNuts at 10:50 AM on September 27, 2006

I've seen that often when something was written on a Mac, sent via email, and pasted in on a Windows machine. I think the charsets don't always follow.

Sometimes you'll see a "2" or "3" in place of where curley quotes should be. And I usually see a "?" in place of where a long "em dash" should be.

It's not an encoding issue, it's probably because they pasted non HTML appropriate characters into an HTML page... where they should be using — for an "em dash" for example. (I typed "& # 1 5 1 ;" without the spaces to make that em dash above.)
posted by umlaut at 10:53 AM on September 27, 2006

If it's not an encoding issue, why are other FF users seeing the correct text right now, while I'm still seeing the incorrect version?

(and yes, I cleared my cache)
posted by Gamblor at 10:54 AM on September 27, 2006

Have you changed the font or anything?

Everything is at the default setting.
posted by Gamblor at 10:59 AM on September 27, 2006

The page is actually windows-1252, not iso-8859-1, despite the meta charset line. Microsoft altered 8859-1 by adding curly quotes and other characters.

Under View - Character Encoding, try choosing either a generic one like Unicode or the Windows-1252 setting. Should work.
posted by jellicle at 11:07 AM on September 27, 2006

jellicle, you're a gentleman(woman?) and a scholar. UTF-8 and Windows-1252 did the trick.
posted by Gamblor at 11:19 AM on September 27, 2006

I typed "& # 1 5 1 ;" without the spaces to make that em dash above.

& # 8 2 1 2 ; (without the spaces) is the correct code for an em dash.
posted by kirkaracha at 12:45 PM on September 27, 2006

“It's not an encoding issue, it's probably because they pasted non HTML appropriate characters into an HTML page...”

That’s absolutely wrong. The only characters which must be escaped in HTML are & (&) and < (<).
posted by ijoshua at 2:47 PM on September 27, 2006

But only if they're not followed by a space. And don't forget &quot; for quote marks inside attributes.
posted by deadfather at 7:38 PM on September 27, 2006

>It's not an encoding issue, it's probably because they pasted non HTML appropriate characters into an HTML page...

Take out the "HTML" and that kind of makes sense. Oh, and also the "not".

No characters are "non appropriate". They are only appropriate for one or other encoding.

If they meant an em-dash, and the page is in unicode, then they should have used the unicode for an em-dash.

If they meant an em-dash and the page is in 8859-1, then they should used the 8859-1 em-dash.

Problems like this happen when they've used the em-dash for one encoding and the page is in another.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 12:00 AM on September 28, 2006