[17496] in Athena Bugs
Re: bug with netscape and sendbug doesn't work right
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jacob Morzinski)
Tue Feb 1 09:00:54 2000
To: chappell@MIT.EDU
Cc: bugs@MIT.EDU
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From: Jacob Morzinski <jmorzins@MIT.EDU>
Date: 01 Feb 2000 09:00:43 -0500
In-Reply-To: Isaac Chappell's message of Mon, 31 Jan 2000 10:33:54 -0500
Message-ID: <w6mhfft2fas.fsf@well.mit.edu>
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<chappell@MIT.EDU> (Isaac Chappell) writes:
> What were you trying to do?
> reading websites
[...]
> punctuation marks like ' and such are not showing up, being replaced
> by question marks (?) like the netscape has no idea what the
> character maps to.
A comment from the sidelines: (The summary is that this is a
problem with each individual website, and not with netscape.)
Netscape shows a '?' character when it doesn't know how to
display a letter. Unfortunately, many websites contain Windows-
specific characters, for which there *is* no display character on
Unix. Specifically, they often include "curly"-quotes, bullets,
or long hyphens as raw characters. These characters do not exist
in the iso-8859-1 character set (which is Unix's default), and
since they don't exist there are no font glyphs for them.
(Note that Macintosh users will have problems on these web pages
too. For example, they'll see '¹' (superscript 1) for the most
common curly quote, again because the foreign website is
carelessly assuming that all their readers use Windows boxes.)
The solution is to convince the world to properly identify their
websites as containing windows-1250 codepage data, which would at
least let netscape _know_ that the character is a curly quote.
Without knowing, netscape is doing the right thing by showing '?'.
-Jacob Morzinski
