[thelist] One of The Tips I Owe :)

[jay.blanchard at thermon.com]

<tip type="ASP, ASCII, Hex, and Globalization" author="Jay Blanchard">
This tip is based on initial information provided by Bimal Shah (thanks
Bimal for all you did to locate the original cause of the error!) of this
list with regards to foreign versions of Win98 and IE 5.0, 5.5, and 6.0 and
further tested on multiple language versions of the OS with IE, with only
the default character set installed for each system. As the web is supposed
to be a global entity and only 6-7% of the world speaks English....

Long-time users of the Windows operating system are familiar with the
Character Map feature for locating and using special characters, such as
the copyright (©) mark, in our text. Some of us have even learned the
keyboard shortcuts (like alt+0169) and use them just as naturally as we
would any other keyboard shortcut. Where HTML and ASP are concerned this
can be a bad thing as it may lead foreign versions of the IE browser on a
Win98 platform to choke (it does not seem to effect NN and Opera in tests
performed). No documentation can be found concerning this on any of the M$
sites. Using the Character Map or keyboard shortcut to insert these special
characters places Hex codes (like U+00A9) within the document that foreign
character sets are not likely to have, causing the page to fail.

Current versions of markup language have equivalents to most of these
special characters which you can recognize by the ampersand at the
beginning of the code snippet (i.e. &copy;) and the semi-colon at the end.
Actually there is a wide array of special characters available, add them to
your arsenal for more accurate markup.

Incidentally, in tests all of the codes for special characters validated
just fine at the W3C.
</tip>

Happy Friday! I brought real Louisiana gumbo to the office today (I am
Cajun by heritage) for a small Mardi Gras celebration, it's gonna' be a
good day!

Jay