> I made a simple web site with Netscape's built-in editor, and when
> I went to publish it using Fetch, the apostrophes and quotation marks
> were translated into weird characters.
You sound like you're using curly (AKA typographer's) quotes - the simple
answer is to stop doing it and stick to straight ones. If you're typing
opt-[ for ", for example, don't. If you type " and you get curly quotes,
switch curly/typographer's/smart quotes off.
It is possible to make them appear correctly on Web pages by adding a line
which tells browsers that the text is Mac text, but that won't work in IE 6
for Windows, so it's not worth bothering. However, if you don't mind it
breaking in IE 6, put this line inside the head tag on the page:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=x-mac-roman">
and this will solve the problem for most other browsers.
Most sites (except mine) stick to straight quotes anyhow. Along the same
vein, avoid everything that is typed using opt combinations, like accented
chars, bullets (opt-8), em/en-dashes, etc. - they will all fail.
If you do need such characters (including under IE 6), you will need to
encode them with what are called HTML entities - character sequences that
browsers will interpret. These generally all have helpful name forms, but
Netscape 4.x and earlier won't accept those, so either stick to the numeric
forms (bad practise) or ditch Netscape 4.x which is a dead weight anyhow.
Common entities:
Entity:
Char: Code form: Name form:
left single quote ‘ ‘
right single quote ’ ’
left double quote “ “
right double quote ” ”
em dash — —
en dash – –
e acute ? é
a grave ? à
u umlaut ? ü
So, "this is Jen's quote" becomes “this is Jen’s quote” -
fun, eh? I do all my HTML like this :P
An alternative solution may be to use an editor which supports Unicode, and
that might do all the correct Unicode char codes for you, but I am very old
school and don't do stuff like that. BBEdit might do that, though - it
certainly supports Unicode.
More technical explanation:
Before Unicode, characters on computers were stored as 8-bits - that's a
range of 256 chars. 0-31 are reserved for control codes, and 13 and 10 are
used variously on DOS/Mac/Win/*NIX for line breaks.
Characters from 32 (space) through 126 are standard (ASCII) on all machines
using the Roman (AKA Latin) alphabet. 'A' is 65, for example, and 'Z' is 90.
'a' is 97, and '\' is 92. 127 is officially backspace, I think, but it's
different on the Mac.
Characters from 128 through 255 are undefined, and are referred to as
Extended ASCII - *NIX machines have a set of symbols for those codes
(accented chars, mathematical symbols, and so on). Microsoft use the same
set for Windows as *NIX does, but there is a gap of unused chars (only they
do have uses - Microsoft messed up) in the *NIX definition that Microsoft
filled in in Windows, with curly quotes and long dashes and so on. This
screw up is why the code forms in the table above are not meant to be used.
Mac OS has a different set of characters in 128-255 - many like the accented
chars and the dashes and so on are the same, but are arranged differently.
Mac OS and Windows also each have some symbols not found on the other.
Now, when you make a Web page using fancy symbols like curly quotes, you're
using Mac OS Extended ASCII. Problem is, *all* browsers (even Mac ones)
assume that all pages use Windows Extended ASCII unless told otherwise.
Thus, your left double quote, char 210, will appear as whatever Windows has
at 210 - maybe O with an umlaut or something. You can tell the browser to
use Mac OS extended ASCII, but as I said, this does not work in IE 6 for
Windows, which is a royal pain.
Does that make it any clearer? :PP
- Dan.
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