UTF-8 display (was: Re: a mug)

[Marcel Schneider]

On 21 Jul 2015, at 14;49, philip chastney 
wrote:

> so the webmaster put up the page, declaring the charset to be UTF-8...
> 
> but what charset was being used by the guy who knocked out the HTML?
> 
> it could be more complicated than that: maybe the page was produced using UTF-8, 
> somebody reads the page using, say, WIndows 1252, and "converts" it to UTF-8
> 
> I'm sure, with a little effort, ever more complicated scenarii could be constructed
> -- it's amazing what can be achieved when arrogance and ignorance are combined


I fear things have grown somewhat upside down, so I'll try to outline the real scenario:

1 - I open the page, the horizontal ellipsis is displayed as … (of course I don't know yet that it's a horizontal ellipsis...).
2 - I remember my comment about the T-shirt and decide to check whether it's accurate. Firefox shows me the page is in UTF-8 and that there is nothing after "Our apologies".
3 - After some trial and error, I save the page in Zotero and open the folder. The only HTML file inside is declared as Windows-1252, and there is the horizontal ellipsis.
4 - I back up the original file, try modifying the charset value to utf-8 and refresh the page, the … converts to a horizontal ellipsis.

To answer your questions, I figure out that the page was written on a Windows-1252 template but without sticking with this charset. U+2026 was probably an autocorrect. So it was "produced using UTF-8" but "the webmaster" must have published it under the old charset.

The puzzling point is that Firefox tried UTF-8 and told me he's serious, but "ate" the U+2026 while it used the native Windows-1252 to "display" it...

I hope that some macro could enable the "webmasters" to rapidly update websites, because resolving this "funny" "scenario" has cost me some "effort" today!

Marcel
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