On the topic of unicode support…
With Safari 3 beta on Mac OS X 10.4.10, Apple Canada's Hot News contains incorrectly encoded characters that are appearing as �. The characters appear correctly on the US site.
I should add that I'm not pointing this out to pick on Apple. I just find it deeply ironic that the company that produces Safari (which arguably has the best unicode support of any browser out there) has unicode encoding problems. Isn't that ironic? That's the right word, right?
What is ↩?
The iPhone can't render ↩, but I figured if anyone was really curious they'd use Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox or whatever to see it. Sure, the iPod touch and iPhone are great for reading blogs, but nobody would use one without a desktop browser. And every desktop browser can show a real ↩ glyph, right?
Wrong! I don't know if it's a general problem, but my copy of Internet Explorer 7 (on Windows XP SP2) can't render it either.
So here it is, in all it's glory:
Now don't complain that I make no effort to support Internet Explorer users. See? I took a screen shot of TextEdit for you.
↩ in URLs
Background information: Daring Fireball linked to my previous article about the missing ↩ glyph in the iPhone and iPod touch. Thankfully, mx gave me a heads up1, and I switched a few settings on my site to better deal with the extra attention.2
Watching the log, though, I find one thing interesting:
[19/Oct/2007:12:12:37 -0700] "GET /wp-content/themes/pyilewptheme/iphone.css HTTP/1.1" 200 355 "http://pyile.com/2007/10/i-want-my-%e2%86%a9/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/419.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3"
[19/Oct/2007:12:12:37 -0700] "GET /wp-content/themes/pyilewptheme/iphone.css HTTP/1.1" 200 354 "http://pyile.com/2007/10/i-want-my-%E2%86%A9/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.5) Gecko/20070718 Firefox/2.0.0.5"
It looks like Safari and Firefox encode the ↩ differently in URLs. I'm not sure which, if either, is "wrong3," but I found this interesting. When I was testing the ↩ in the URL, I only checked that it worked in Firefox and Safari. I didn't think to check that they requested it the same way. I imagine Apache is doing the conversion here, but would other web servers do it as well?
- Actually, it was Allen, but his email had a brief stay in purgatory. [↩]
- It looks like the particular Dreamhost server I'm on is being slammed, and from the load, it definitely isn't just this that's doing it. Although I can't imagine I'm helping much. [↩]
- I'm sure it's in the HTTP spec, but I can't be bothered looking it up right now. [↩]
I want my ↩!
Curiously, the iPhone and iPod touch are missing the ↩ glyph1. I'm sure it's missing because Apple never thought anyone would use it, but it's being used as a footnote return character by John Gruber, Allen Pike and mx, among thousands2 more.
Apple does respond to feedback, so it's worth asking. If you've got an iPod touch, file feedback here. If you've got an iPhone, the feedback site is here.