From: John Joyce <dangerwillrobinsondanger@...>
Date: 2007-05-07T21:49:39+09:00
Subject: Re: [OT] A question for people with English OS


On May 7, 2007, at 9:08 PM, Harry Kakueki wrote:

>>
>
> Thanks for the input.
>
> Would you look at this without changing any settings and tell me if
> you see Japanese or gibberish?
>
> http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-list/43471
>
> Thank you.
>
> Harry
>
> http://www.kakueki.com/ruby/list.html
> A Look into Japanese Ruby List in English
>
Japanese. But the page itself is created with bad old HTML with  
capital letters in the elements.
It contains no DOCTYPE declaration.
Also the page contains no character set encoding declaration.
It's basically up to the user-agent (browser application) in this  
case to parse it and guess correctly.
User-agents (mostly browsers) often have a 'quirks mode' where  
they're really pretty amazingly good at rendering a badly formed page.
When the doctype and encoding are not specified, your results will  
either be something readable or a complete mess, or something in  
between.
Fortunately the page itself is simple enough that the problems it has  
as an html document are not preventing viewing.

Whoever hosts that site (I've visited it before) should really spend  
a few minutes to update the thing.
If you are having trouble viewing it, or others are, the best bet is  
to try a different browser.
It works fine in Safari, which is gecko and KHTML based.
it works fine in Firefox as well.
It even works in Opera.

If it works in those, you can't ask for much more.
Older browsers may have more trouble.
But good modern browsers are free so there is no reason to support  
ancient (by computer standards) technology.