SlashChick's Journal: Slashdot switches to UTF-8!

I can't believe the Slashdot team actually fixed a bug I submitted, but they did.

After installing Japanese font support on my system, I noticed that Slashdot started rendering in Japanese. This, to put it mildly, stinks. Random Japanese characters appear and the font is hideous.

I figured out that this was because Slashdot doesn't specify a character set for the page to be rendered in. Since it isn't specified, IE decides it needs to be Japanese (I still can't decide whether this is a default setting or whether it's sniffing out something in the page. The W3C specs say not to assume a default, but who knows what IE is really doing.)

Anyway, I reopened an old Slashcode bug and explained a couple of ways to fix the problem. (If you have a web site and you don't know what I am talking about, definitely read the W3C page on the subject and familiarize yourself with how to set a charset. Otherwise, your website may also be rendering in Japanese for some of us.)

Pudge replied to my bug submission. Apparently, Slashcode has a built-in field for the charset, and they had just never bothered to set it. Well, tonight, the fix went into effect, and Slashdot is now rendered in UTF-8... which is a huge relief to me, as Japanese characters are no longer being displayed on the front page. I just hope there aren't any complaints from those with very old browsers, but I doubt there will be, as pretty much every other website in the world sets the charset by default.

By the way, if you're not setting the charset on your site and you don't want to use a meta tag in every page to set it, you can just add the following lines to a .htaccess file:

AddType text/html;charset=iso-8859-1 html

This will cause all files with a .html extension to be rendered with the iso-8859-1 charset. A similar line for .php and .pl (whichever you use) and you're all set!

IE AutoSelect Encoding....

[shadowspark]

You might have 'AutoSelect' option selected as your encoding for IE.
To remove, go to View-Encoding-European(Western) [Or select whatever you want].
If that doesn't work I'm not sure what would be causing the auto Japanese fonts. I do know this was a fix to resolve a webmail issue at my work.

Re:IE AutoSelect Encoding....

[SlashChick]

Yeah, that works, but you have to do it on every page you view, and it doesn't remember the setting if you clsoe the browser and open it again.

The fix is to set the encoding on the server, period. No one should be suggesting a client-side issue to fix a server-side problem. You should forward the W3C page I linked to above to your webmail team so that they can fix the problem on the server. :)

Re:IE AutoSelect Encoding....

[shadowspark]

You have to un-select 'AutoSelect'. See if that works.

Re:IE AutoSelect Encoding....

[Surak]

You can also do this with SSI or PHP (or Perl) by including a common page on all your pages. Very useful if your site is setup using templates.

Not sure if this was good

[Ignorant Aardvark]

I'm starting to see mangled characters myself using Mozilla - ughh!

UTF-8 is great

[NaveWeiss]

but it doesn't mean that I'll be able to use international characters in slashdot anymore. Slashdot used to allow unicode characters through the HTML entities, but they don't do that anymore, and it's so sad.

The Revolution!

[NaveWeiss]

Apparantly slashdot allows you to use unicode characters (although the lameness filter will limit you a lot), So it allows me to use all kind of characters in my sig - like Hebrew and Latin. Previously I didn't want to put an é in my sig, because I knew it might not get rendered correctly for non-European character encoding. But now I can!
It Ñocks!

Yay!

[MonTemplar]

Now I can see all the Japanese characters in Lingqi's journal [slashdot.org] without having to change the character setting in IE... still don't know what they mean without Lingqi explaining them, but hey, it's a small improvement...