Monday, 7 March 2011

IE8 Compatibility - Get your encoding sets correct!


On the hunt for more (more, more) information on Internet Explorer compatibility issues, I found a great  article from one of the Microsoft IE team, Eric Law.

His blog can be found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/

On of his posting related to HTML character encoding sets (such as UTF7 and UTF8). I have been working on this problem for a while. Specifically looking at mechanism where could identity character streams that may not match the declared encoding set.


And quite helpfully, the class of errors reviewed in that post are referenced in the following Microsoft KB article, found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/304625

You can see that he has found a simple (and by definition; great) example of what happens if you  improperly define your character sets in a document parsed by IE8. I took this issue to heart as you can quite easily determine if your stated character set is not in a pre-determined list, then BANG! You are in trouble.

Meaning that your page probably won't look right and your scripts won't run right.

You can find this list of accepted character encoding aliases here; http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets

My favorite encoding alias is csEUCPkdFmtJapanese which is an alias for the "Extended_UNIX_Code_Packed_Format_for_Japanese" character set.

And, with that I say, "Get your  Code Packed Japanese Formatting on!"


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