[thelist] weird JS error

[Andrew Clover]

Brian Cummiskey <Brian at hondaswap.com> wrote:

> the firefox JS consoel is throwing me a rather weird validation error.

That string of odd characters is what you get if you try to read in this 
ASCII string:

> with (document)
> {
>     write('\bVersion: 1.0.0 - 12-13-2004\b');
> }

as UTF-16. Firefox is simply complaining that the odd characters don't 
appear to be executable JavaScript of any sort.

The problem is that your web server is serving JavaScript files with the 
header:

   Content-Type: text/javascript

However this does not tell the web browser what character encoding the 
file is using. So it has to guess. Firefox's guess is "the same encoding 
as the HTML page that referenced it". And for some reason your HTML page 
is saved as UTF-16, an encoding which uses two bytes per character 
instead of one, and hence one of the few encodings that isn't compatible 
with US-ASCII.

To fix, either make the server specify a character encoding for JS files 
by sending a header such as:

   Content-Type: text/javascript;charset=utf-8

or save the HTML file in a format compatible with US-ASCII. UTF-8 is a 
good choice.

Windows calls the UTF-16 format "Unicode" when you save it, which is 
pretty misleading and might have lead to this inappropriate choice of 
encdings to save under.

-- 
Andrew Clover
mailto:and at doxdesk.com
http://www.doxdesk.com/