character sets: a tale of kanji and praseodymium

Last week I spent some time with a friend helping to get her website working more smoothly.

She hadn’t been aware there was any problems: sat in Tokyo, using a machine set with Japanese defaults, all the text on her site looked fine. Both the text in Japanese and the text in English:

Unfortunately, to me (sat in Birmingham with my machine set to rule-Britannia-there-couldn’t-possibly-be-anyone-speaking-any-other-language defaults, the pages looked like this:

A mixture of English and absolute garbage.

We tracked it down to a missing character set declaration and, with the addition of a simple line of code, I can see both types of text correctly now.

Great!

Ami’s website is here: www006.upp.so-net.ne.jp/AMIKO/. Most of the important pages have been fixed now. If you can’t see the Japanese script properly, at least now you know why!

Meanwhile…

I’d been asking around the Department for any posters that people could let me have.

I managed to get my hands on a couple of rejects. A few of the mistakes were fairly obvious, for example where the printer had jammed, however some were much more subtle.

Presumably the printing computer lacked the correct character set information to be able to display greek letters correctly. Thus, what we normally consider to be a fairly infallible discipline instead confessed its ignorance…