October 5, 2006 | Web Design & Development | 4 Comments
I just hit an interesting snafu with Apple’s Safari browser. While correctly rendering special characters from a page that lacked a doctype and character encoding meta tag, I viewed the page’s source and noticed that Safari wasn’t rendering any special characters that it was rendering in the actual page view.
With the help of the W3C validator I was able to figure out what character encoding the page was in fact using, windows-1252. That’s not really any obscure. So I wonder why Safari was able to correctly decipher the page in HTML view but couldn’t apply the same logic the the source view.
Update and Addition
I’ve created a couple of pages to help illustrate my point. A valid page and an invalid page. For reference here is a valid utf-8 page for comparison. It seems that Safari has issues showing windows-1252 characters in source view in general.
So I guess its rather unfortunate that wether given the correct character encoding or not that Safari won’t show windows-1252 special characters at all in source view.
