Apostrophe Character on a Mac ?

[- Bob -]

I thought the apostrophe/sinngle quote was a safe character to use,
but I just ran into a Mac use who had it showing up as a question mark
(unknown character). Coding it as a ’ fixed the issue.

Is this a problem unique to this user... or is it a regular issue when
producing in a Windows standard character set and displaying on a Mac
? Do I need to get smarter about declaring the right character set ?
Or do I need to encode all apostrophes ?

Thanks,

 

[Chris Vogel]

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I thought the apostrophe/sinngle quote was a safe character to use,
but I just ran into a Mac use who had it showing up as a question mark
(unknown character). Coding it as a ’ fixed the issue.

Is this a problem unique to this user... or is it a regular issue when
producing in a Windows standard character set and displaying on a Mac
? Do I need to get smarter about declaring the right character set ?
Or do I need to encode all apostrophes ?

Thanks,

You can continue to encode them, but I would suggest switching to the
UTF-8 encoding. You should be able to insert them directly then, along
with the occasional Arabic, Cyrillic, etc.

It's such a turn-on to see multiple scripts getting along on the same
page.
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[Dan]

I thought the apostrophe/sinngle quote was a safe character to use,
but I just ran into a Mac use who had it showing up as a question mark
(unknown character). Coding it as a ’ fixed the issue.

Is this a problem unique to this user... or is it a regular issue when
producing in a Windows standard character set and displaying on a Mac
? Do I need to get smarter about declaring the right character set ?
Or do I need to encode all apostrophes ?

It depends on what character encoding your server declares your pages
to be in. If it's iso-8859-1, this does not contain the character
you're trying to use, so any attempt to insert it as a raw 8-bit
character instead of encoded will actually represent a control
character instead in accordance with the specs, and it's then up to the
tender mercies of whatever the receiving system might decide to do with
it. The Windows special characters that are not in the ISO character
set are platform-specific and differ in other systems such as MacOS or
Linux.

 

[- Bob -]

You can continue to encode them, but I would suggest switching to the
UTF-8 encoding. You should be able to insert them directly then, along
with the occasional Arabic, Cyrillic, etc.

Thanks... looks good from my side - I'll get one of my freakish
friends using a Mac to test from their end

 

[patrick j]

I'll get one of my freakish friends using a Mac to test from their end

"Freakish friends using a Mac"?

Dear oh dear

 

[dorayme]

Thanks... looks good from my side - I'll get one of my freakish
friends using a Mac to test from their end

Do you think only freaks use Macs... er...oops...

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Scripsit Chris Vogel:

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Don't be ridiculous. That only contributes to the Usenet supply of garbage.

You can continue to encode them, but I would suggest switching to the
UTF-8 encoding.

Then you would make a wrong suggestion. The question alone indicates that
the OP is not ready for using UTF-8 yet.

You should be able to insert them directly then, along
with the occasional Arabic, Cyrillic, etc.

"Should"? Of course he can enter any Unicode character as soon as he has
found a suitable Unicode-enabled editor for use with HTML, a way to make the
HTTP server send adequate headers, and a basic understanding of what Unicode
is. But that doesn't mean he should use UTF-8 just to enter a casual
apostrophe.

It's such a turn-on to see multiple scripts getting along on the same
page.

Very few HTML authors use multiple scripts on the same page, and even fewer
should.

iD8DBQFFiqde7s5PbTgRmZARAkalAJ92wovOm6jTI/PG1xvk/wSV0F+7FACfUFa5

No, that's not amusing.

 

[Chris Vogel]

Scripsit Chris Vogel:


Don't be ridiculous. That only contributes to the Usenet supply of garbage.

I see some do it in other newsgroups, and I didn't think it would meet
resistance. I'll turn it off.

Thank you for your reply. I thought switching to UTF-8 would be rather
trivial. Maybe I should read your book.

 

[- Bob -]

Then you would make a wrong suggestion. The question alone indicates that
the OP is not ready for using UTF-8 yet.

What would your suggested solution be Jukka? I don't need glamour or
trend, I just need "reliable". The UTF-8 solution worked for the
platforms I tested on (Mac, Win) but my testing is still narrow.

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Scripsit - Bob -:

What would your suggested solution be Jukka?

For the apostrophe, ’ is OK. Using the Ascii apostrophe " would be
even more reliable, at the cost of using an orthographically wrong
character, but everyone and his brother have been doing that on the Web for
years.

The UTF-8 solution worked for the
platforms I tested on (Mac, Win) but my testing is still narrow.

Well, I cannot help with testing, since you didn't specify a URL.

Using UTF-8 just for the sake of some apostrophes sounds overkill, but if
your server sends the correct HTTP header and you also declare the encoding
in a <meta> tag, it's of course a feasible approach, too. But are you sure
that you, and others who might edit the pages, will be able to use a UTF-8
enabled editor in all circumstances and will remember to keep UTF-8 as the
encoding when saving an edited copy?

The original question sounded like you had used windows-1252 (Windows Latin
1) without declaring the encoding. That would typically result in wrong
display in some (relatively rare) situations.