Glossary and narr essay showing up wierd for me

[Callan S.]

The forge glossary and the nar essay are showing up as a bunch of junk characters to me right now. I looked at some other articles and they come up okay, so that's kind of odd (makes me think it isn't my old browser version or anything to blame).

Really only wanted the glossary so I could look up IIEE again...keep forgetting it (Intent, I???, Execution, Effect??).

[Rob Carriere]

Really only wanted the glossary so I could look up IIEE again...keep forgetting it (Intent, I???, Execution, Effect??).

Intent, Initiation, Execution, and Effect

Glad to see I'm not the only one who can't remember the expansion of that acronym. :-)

The forge glossary and the nar essay are showing up as a bunch of junk characters to me right now. I looked at some other articles and they come up okay, so that's kind of odd (makes me think it isn't my old browser version or anything to blame).

It probably is. Those two articles are XHTML/Latin-1, while the rest are HTML/ASCII. XHTML can confuse older browsers and extended character sets are a major headache as soon as you go cross-platform--which in this case includes cross-Windows versions :-(  I have no idea what percentage of Forge visitors might affected, but maybe a tool like Tidy could be used to convert from XHTML/Latin-1 to XHTML/ASCII? There is no loss involved and it's significantly more robust.

SR
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[xiombarg]

So, the question is: What OS and browser are you using to view the glossary?

[Callan S.]

IE, version 6. I'm usually pretty slack about updating, but I'm sure I did only a few months ago. Yeah, its sounds bad, but I don't know what the latest update number of IE is. If ya want I can give the rest of the version number too.

[Rob Carriere]

OK, that's weird.

IE6.0 SP1 (plus a bunch of patches) is the latest greatest, so you're at least very close to current. IE6 shouldn't have any trouble with the XHTML. Worse yet, I just checked the actual content of those two articles against what they claim to be, and the Gamism essay is actually encoded in XHTML, despite having an HTML DTD (and the validator barfed all over my shoes). The glossary on the other hand is what it says it is, and is close to correct as well (4 errors on the page, many large commercial sites would wish they could say that).  And, on both pages the webserver gives the correct header info.

So...you'd expect more trouble with the Gamism article then the glossary, but it's the other way around...

Tentative diagnosis: it's your OS, somehow. Since you say IE, I assume you're using Windows. What version and what locality (US-English, International-English, German, Japanese, etc.)?  Also, do you have any software installed on the computer that plays funny games with lots of fonts? (DTP software, east-asian editors, etc)? Finally, could you perhaps post an image (make a small cut from a screenshot) that shows exactly what you're seeing?

SR
EDITed to show that shouldn't is spelled with an L.
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[Callan S.]

Well, as a work around I've found netscape will view them properly.

Anyway, I can't say I've got lots of little downloaded toys added on to IE. I don't even think I've managed to get quicktime as yet. It's pretty vanilla.

Anyway, the work around should do it for now. Thanks for everyones time! :)