Anthony Bourdain attached to unleashes his bile made me laugh. Also, if you are looking for a producer who is well-versed in working on pilots, we can talk compensation later. Finally, computer wiz kid, can you make it possible for people to comment with quotation marks, apostrophes, etc.? Or maybe that's an internet thing, not a Juniorbird-specific thing...

I can't reproduce your problem. Can you give me more details about it? Two things should happen with quotes:

• They should automatically be switched to be typographically-correct "smart quotes" as seen right there
• If you surround a phrase with quotes, then put a colon directly after it, then any content that follows the colon without a space before it will be interpreted as a URL. So, "this is a link":http://juniorbird.com becomes this is a link

Are you seeing other behavior?

Or are you complaining that *text surrounded by asterixes* becomes bolded? But isn't the purpose of those asterixes to provide emphasis? And doesn't bold mean emphasis? Also, * asterix space content space asterix * shouldn't be bolded, so there's an easy work-around. Nothing happens to /either/ \slash\ . I'm sure you can find a good workaround! Just avoid asterixes and underscores.

Asterix? Uh, don't you mean Asterisk?

And personally, I find all the conversions irritating. If I want to write "star-g-star" to represent "grin", I don't want some interpreter messing it up. If I want markup, I'll write well-formed HTML, dammit.

I think the last decent show on Food Network is Good Eats. And while I do like Alton Brown, I can definitely see a market for some more high-end cooking shows.

Wow -- ever ask a question and wish you could take it back? I'm sorry, but I couldn't understand most of what was just said. Between the "Nothing happens to /either/ \slash\" and the markups and such I'm in over my head. My bottom line: previously, whenever I wanted to use a contraction, the word showed up with a question mark where the apostrophe should have been. Same thing with quotation marks. Therefore, I stopped using contractions, which I felt was crampin' my style. But now I see that the apostrophes show up just as they should; problem solved! If I still get the “question mark thing” on my home computer, I’ll let you know.

C

But I'm really happy to know how to make a link now -- I'll be so fancy!

Oh, I know what your problem is!

You're aware that computer data is basically numbers, right? So, every character is actually represented by a number. In order to present the characters on your screen, your browser needs to know how to map those numbers to characters. That's called an "encoding".

The "neutral" apostrophe (as opposed to the open- and close-single-quote) is generally encoded in the same place by every encoding; the characters whose numbers are below 0x7F (a hex number equal to decimal 127) are pretty much the same everywhere. But the close-single-quote, which is what Wade's system is turning the apostrophe in contractions into, is Unicode 0x2019, and shows up in various different places. I'm guessing Wade is using Windows Codepage 1252, where that character is 0x92.

Now, WinCP-1252 looks very similar to ISO-8859-1. If your browser is seeing the page, and interpreting it as ISO-8859-1, when it's actually WinCP-1252, what happens is that for every character where the two encodings are the same, you notice nothing; but for the characters where they differ, you'll get something weird. In this case, ISO-8859-1 has no visible character at 0x92. 0x92 is a control code in that encoding. So, your browser presents a question-mark, meaning, "I have no clue what to do with this character." A similar problem could occur if it's mistakenly reading WinCP-1252 as UTF-8 (where close-single-quote is 0x2019), or any other confusion of those three.

To fix this in FireFox, you'd go to the View menu, look at Character Encoding, and try swapping to one of the others of these three (ISO-8859-1, Windows Codepage 1252, or UTF-8).

Also, while it's possible that your browser just isn't complying with web standards, it's also possible that Wade is failing to declare the encoding in his webpages.

Yeah, I think you're right on there, Auros. Unfortunately, my pages do declare the encoding as iso-8859-1, so I'm not sure what the fix is here. Go to UTF-8?

Huh. ISO-8859-1 doesn't contain Right Single Quotation Mark. Are you using a &named; entity?

I generally am in favor of UTF-8, and Unicode as universal standard.

Hmm, I chose 8859-1 as my encoding because the plugins I use for auto-formatting output that as a default. Looking at the source, special characters are encoded as xxx;, which I think (but am not sure) is a UTF-8 encoding. Somewhere there must be some setting that's overriding things. I'll have to find it and get everything on the same codepage, as it were. Is there any reaason not to switch to UTF-8, since I think I can modify the settings on my plugins to do that?

&#xhexits; is an entity naming the character with that hex-numbered Unicode codepoint. To use decimal you omit the "x".

I guess if that's really what's in the code, then Court's problem might be that her font doesn't even contain the relevant characters -- it'd have to be pretty damn old, though, for that to be the case... Or she could have a browser that either doesn't know that part of the standard, or doesn't know Unicode. Again, it'd have to be ancient: my Win98 machine, bought in '99, handles this feature fine.

Just looking at the code, it appears your conversion is using the &#decimal; format... Which, like I said, should be fine for any browser/font/computer more recent than '97...

Now, my decimal character entities are unicode, right? But my page is telling her browser its 8859-1. So is her browser right to be confused? I tend to think so. Or am I misunderstanding what's going on?

OK, this is hilarious to me. And I still feel kind of bad for starting all this trouble, but if you?re still trying to figure out what?s going on:

My computer is only a few months old so, unlike me, it probably understands ?that part of the standard,? and also probably knows Unicode. As you can see above, when I type quotes and apostrophes, it is messing something up. However, if it?s only me who has this problem, I?ll just go back to posting without using contractions, ?quotes,? dashes ? and ellipses? I’m pretty adaptable. But thanks for all of the time you spent trying to figure this out!

Wow, I have no idea why there are those question marks in your post there. Any ideas, Auros? If you look at the source, those are actual question marks...

Maybe this is a symptom of whatever the problem is that prevents you from being able to run AIM Express?

Wade: "Now, my decimal character entities are unicode, right? But my page is telling her browser its 8859-1."

The encoding should matter for characters that are actually stored as a single character with the relevant bit pattern. If you store it as a series of characters (ampersand, pound, etc), then those characters should be interpreted through the encoding, and then the logic of the browser, and be presented appropriately. So, like I said, to have them misinterpreted says that something's gone very wrong in her browser or OS, or she's got vintage '97 tech.

But apparently that's not the case. Maybe MS screwed something up in IE7? Wouldn't be the first time they broke the standard.

Oh, and as for the question-marks in her most recent post -- maybe she hit the Preview button? If the comment text-box gets filled in with the contents of what's previewed, then whatever glitch she's suffering might've kicked in, and put the question-marks in... Certainly I do know that on many sites, if you explicitly type an entity into a comment (say, ampersand raquo semicolon), then preview, when you get the contents of the comment back on the preview page, the entity will've been replaced by the character... Except, I just tested that, and it doesn't happen in this site.

OK, I give up. I'm stumped. Court's computer is just possessed by the Demon of Fixed-Width Single-Byte encodings.

As a clarification on the above -- keep in mind that ampersand, pound, semicolon, and all the numbers and basic letters are in the "less than or equal to 0x7F" range, so they're the same across all common encodings. That's exactly why this format is used to store named and numbered entities -- it's independent of encoding, whereas the characters being referred to by the entities are not.