Comments on: Firefox and Unicode

Question: Firefox and Unicode

PrinceValium — Sun, 27 Jun 2004 18:57:12 -0800

Why does Firefox insist on loading pages with Unicode character coding, when I prefer Western character coding? The former turns high-ASCII characters like § into question marks; the latter displays these normally. Does this happen to anyone else, and can I fix it?

By: 4easypayments

4easypayments — Sun, 27 Jun 2004 19:28:13 -0800

Which version? I'm using firefox and saw your § just fine.

By: jbrjake

jbrjake — Sun, 27 Jun 2004 19:37:02 -0800

Worked on firefox here, too. Check your preferences, PrinceValium. There should be an option to change character encoding under General:Language. At least, there is in OS X.

By: PrinceValium

PrinceValium — Sun, 27 Jun 2004 19:55:51 -0800

0.8/XP. I don't see a language option in the preferences.

By: TungstenChef

TungstenChef — Sun, 27 Jun 2004 20:19:57 -0800

Time to upgrade to 0.9. Trust me, it's worth it.

By: dhoyt

dhoyt — Sun, 27 Jun 2004 20:28:07 -0800

Ironic. I just posted a similar question (assuming I'm understanding you) to another forum this morning, but didn't get any helpful advice:

"I haven't been using Firefox 0.9 long enough to notice too many issues, but do any of you notice weird character substitutions? For example, I was reading this page (cred points: +1) and every character that was supposed to be a quotation mark (") is converted instead to a question mark (?). Is there any way to change that? I just checked it in Internet Explorer and it displayed fine."

By: PrinceValium

PrinceValium — Sun, 27 Jun 2004 20:43:35 -0800

I think I found the culprit. The default Movable Type template includes this meta tag:

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

I'm going to cut this from my own template, but it would be nice if I could override the defaults.

By: falconred

falconred — Sun, 27 Jun 2004 20:44:00 -0800

Don't know what's going on - I'm Firefox 0.9 on XP and I see the special characters fine.

I just checked and my default character set is indeed set to Western: Tools > Options > General > Languges

By: kindall

kindall — Sun, 27 Jun 2004 22:28:42 -0800

The former turns high-ASCII characters like § into question marks

There's no such thing as "high-ASCII." If it has a code above 127, it's not ASCII.

People should be using Unicode anyway; it makes redundant most encodings except perhaps some of the Asian ones. If you won't use Unicode, use named HTML entities for things like §.

By: lbergstr

lbergstr — Sun, 27 Jun 2004 23:29:24 -0800

So can someone summarize what's happening on pages like Gawker? My default character encoding is set to Western, so ... it's their fault and there's nothing I can do because Firefox's behavior is "correct"?

(sorry if I sound grumpy)

By: dash_slot-

dash_slot- — Mon, 28 Jun 2004 04:01:09 -0800

lbergstr; I get ?'s all over that page too. My browser is Mozilla 1.7, and character set is western iso 8859-1 (on Win98):

You 're a lame and a ?pussy, Doug. And you should know better than to try and wage war on me. ?I'm better, stronger and smarter than you, you little Nancy. If I wanted to take your girl out, I would. You have nothing I can't take?away from?you, you non-man. ?Doug, you little tiny fairy, you arrested boy,

What's weird is that if removed, there seems to be no natural replacement for those ?'s.

By: alidarbac

alidarbac — Mon, 28 Jun 2004 04:17:36 -0800

People should be using Unicode anyway; it makes redundant most encodings except perhaps some of the Asian ones

I use Unicode in my oft-neglected Chinese blog exactly because it makes the different Asian encodings redundant. Using Unicode, it's possible to write traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese (and whatever other language) all in the same post.

By: Mo Nickels

Mo Nickels — Mon, 28 Jun 2004 06:23:50 -0800

The Gawker page is not a good page to judge by, as there are artifacts in the quoted letter left over from a copy-and-paste job from email.

The Chunklet page looks fine in Firefox 0.9 with Western encoding on Windows 2000 Pro.

By: smackfu

smackfu — Mon, 28 Jun 2004 07:19:27 -0800

I'm using Firefox on Win 2k with Unicode (UTF-8) encoding and the § in the question shows up fine. Weird.

By: Hackworth

Hackworth — Mon, 28 Jun 2004 11:44:25 -0800

I don't think Firefox comes with auto-detect encoding on by default. Try View>Character Encoding>Auto-Detect>Universal