[tlug] OT: IE6, UTF-8 and titular stupidity

[Darren Cook <darren@example.com>]

I'm sure I'm not the only one here who chooses UTF-8 for web sites, and
does most of their testing in firefox, with a quick
"test-in-IE6/swear/modify" cycle just before launch.

I had someone viewing a site of mine saying that when they clicked the
Japanese button they get a blank screen. I tried it today in an internet
cafe and was shocked to get the same. There goes "blaming the user". I
came home, tried on our windows notebook, and got the same. Firefox is
fine. Meta tag is UTF-8. Header being sent is UTF-8.

I'll spare you the trial and error and just say I found out you go to
View|Encoding and uncheck auto-detect, then go to any site, and choose
Shift-JIS (you cannot select this until looking at a page). Then you can
view any number of sites, even close your browser, and you are stuck in
Shift-JIS. Headers and meta tags ignored forever. And you don't see
mojibake when viewing a UTF-8 page - the whole UTF-8 page (even the
English on it) just disappears.

Now, after writing the above I checked on some other sites, and found
this wasn't always the case. In most sites it auto-detects or gives
mojibake. After more experimentation, I found the problem only happens
(in conjunction with the above settings) when I have Japanese in the
<title> tag.

No, wait, some Japanese is okay. "サーチ" fails. Kanji works. "ネット
ワーク" works. Eh? "サチ" fails. "サ" works. What are these Microsoft
programmers smoking?? "チ" fails. "チチ" works. "チチチ" fails.

I give up. Title changed to "検索", problem solved, off to bed.

This was probably off-topic, but hopefully it is useful to someone ('cos
as the above shows tracking it down is not trivial).

Darren

P.S. Once I switch auto-detect on, I had trouble reproducing the problem
after switching it back off. If you also cannot reproduce it remember
you cannot change the encoding when looking at a blank page - you need
to view a page with content then change the encoding. (Clearing cache
and history does *not* seem to be required.)

-- 
Darren Cook
http://dcook.org/mlsn/ (English-Japanese-German-Chinese free dictionary)
http://dcook.org/work/ (About me and my work)
http://dcook.org/work/charts/  (My flash charting demos)