230121 - Error (or not) displaying unknown characters

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[u51419]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007

I cannot tell if this is just my system or not. My font display is set to UTF-8
which I assume allows display of the most possible characters. Look the above
page. On my browser the "o" or whatever in Leon and the degree symbol are
represented by the <?> symbol. Is this a mozilla bug or am I missing a font or
something. I dearly apologize if this is not a real bug but cannot tell on my
own system because even a source code display gives the <?> character

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to website
2. View how "Leon Zeldis, 33^0" is displayed.


Actual Results:  
Actualy characters should display

Expected Results:  
Although not much on this pages, some sites come up with a huge percentage of
unknown characters.

I have upgraded my system for language support in all available languages.

Comment 1

[Patrick]

I think this is a dupe of bug 117881. The site's headers say it's sending
ISO-8859-1.

Comment 2

[u51419]

Does that make a difference? I mean, would not UTF-8 include everything sent by
ISO-8859-1? Should I make a setting change on my end?

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

If the site claims to be in ISO-8859-1, we have to decode it as such.  We can't
just treat it as UTF-8, since the bytes used to encode a character are totally
different in the two encodings.

All that said, the accented "o" is a valid ISO-8859-1 character and shows up
correctly over here (current Linux trunk build).  So yes, sounds like you need
to install a font that has that character and claims to be a "western" font....

Comment 4

[u51419]

Attachment: Font settings preferences dialog

Comment 5

[u51419]

Like this? (See attachment)

Comment 6

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

When you say your "font display is set to UTF-8", what do you mean exactly? If
you mean the "Default Character Coding" in the Languages preference panel, you
will get better results most of the time if you leave that at ISO-8859-1.
Websites that actually use UTF-8 have (mostly) the correct headers or encoding
declarations and Just Work.

Comment 7

[u51419]

What I mean is that everywhere on about:config, wherever a setting had
ISO-8859-1 as the sole and only setting, I changed it to UTF-8. Where there was
a list, I left it alone. I don't really understand your last sentence.

Comment 8

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

BTW, comment 1 seems to be inaccurate:

.Resolving www.goanchor.com... done
.Connecting to www.goanchor.com[209.61.157.228]:80... connected
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 13,606 [text/html]
200 OK

Comment 9

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

Steve, please set the value of intl.charset.default back to ISO-8859-1 in
about:config.

(Even after doing that the page may still display incorrectly because the
charset is cached, so you should reload it with Shift-Reload.)

If the page then displays correctly, and so do UTF-8 pages such as
http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/utf8.html, then this bug report can be marked
INVALID.

Comment 10

[u51419]

The first poem came out as just question marks, not <?> symbols. I appreciate
everyone's kind and undeserved help.