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Dear LEGO Direct:
Please view the following webpage on a Linux system and on a Mac running a
non-Microsoft browser:
http://www.lego.com/INmotion/designit.asp
On that page, you will see is a passage of text which goes like this:
We need LEGO parent’s help.
Note that the text is displayed incorrectly on non-Windows systems because
it contains a Windows-specific character which isn't part of the ISO-8859-1
standard character set. Here is how it shows up on Netscape for Linux:
We need LEGO parent?s help.
The ? is displayed there because the browser doesn't know how to display the
invalid Microsoft "smart quote" character. I believe this happens on several
other webpages on www.lego.com as well. I think I've seen the same problem
in a few of the LEGO press releases.
These simple mistakes look unprofessional, but fortunately they are very easy
to correct!
To fix these bugs, simply apply the following transformation to all inflicted
HTML files:
Replace With
This: This: Comment:
This allows you to keep the fancy quotation-mark characters without having
to convert them to the 7-bit-ASCII ' and " characters, and they'll display
correctly on every web browser I've ever seen, even though they're technically
still in violation of the ISO-8859-1 standard. (In other words, it's not a
standards-compliant fix, but for all practical purposes, it's a good enough
fix, and it's undeniably better than leaving it totally broken.)
In general, raw 8-bit characters above ASCII 127 should never be put into a
production HTML page. They should always instead be encoded using either
&#<...>; or &<...>; .
Matthew Miller pointed out a tool last year which can help HTML authors
correct these and other HTML bugs resulting from the use of Microsoft tools:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/demoroniser/
A similar fixer-upper lies within LUGNET's web interface to the newsgroups.
For example, the raw text of this article,
http://news.lugnet.com/news/raw.cgi?lugnet.lego.direct,1595
contains the raw ’ character (because that's how I submitted it from my
newsreader) but the website corrects this by converting it to its proper
HTML form:
http://news.lugnet.com/lego/direct/?n=1595
(To see it, do a View Source on that page and look for “ where the raw
text contains the raw ’ character.)
--Todd Lehman
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