Deep Politics Forum

The little black triangles are back I'm afraid.

I've reverted the HTML coding settings to utf-8 because the setting needed to get rid of the triangles produces much more intrusive gobbledigook - even if on fewer pages.

The problem is this: When an html interpreter (user agent) encounters a character string that it does not understand (ie not in its defined character set) it replaces it with its standard error character - for utf-8 that's the little black triangle.

Unfortunately we have documents on the forum composed whilst the relevant CP setting was both utf-8 and ISO-8859-1. The latter is most widely used in Europe because of it's accented characters capability.

The issue therefore boils down to "which is the least intrusive problem". Until yesterday the answer to that appeared obvious. Then I noticed that the 'Welcome-back' message had become near unreadable because of this issue and therefore switched back. There are other such documents to.

The current encoding setting (utf-8) displays a black triangle when it encounters two successive spaces or an apostrophe in a document composed whilst the encoding setting was NOT utf-8. Sigs etc are easily corrected by simple editing.

Documents copied and pasted from European publication are likely to display lots of little black triangles.

It may be possible to specify an encoding for the user agent that includes both utf-8 and ISO-8859-1, in which case - problem solved. Looking into it. 'Till then we'll just have to live with it.

thanks mr.techie, glad you are around, your the kind of fella that is irreplaceable on a forum, thanks much..b

Never mind.

Thanks for the explanation.

Perhaps lost to the winds of time, but whatever the settings were before the Putsch, it worked fine with documents from all over. :joystick:

Better the black triangles than the Bronstein Bermuda triangle. I'm sure Peter will find the solution soon. Like you say Peter, the settings on the old forum worked fine. We'll get there.

Magda Hassan Wrote:Better the black triangles than the Bronstein Bermuda triangle. I'm sure Peter will find the solution soon. Like you say Peter, the settings on the old forum worked fine. We'll get there.

I dont find it horribly annoying - I live in CZ, which uses a different character set than most languages, and can never get all of my programs to display it properly - usually those programmed in the USA. where awareness of the rest of the world is atrophied.