Pay Attention to Encoding!
My company recently received a leaflet from (HMRC) with an invitation to attend one of their EmployerTalk seminars about payroll and tax including pay as you earn (PAYE). On the way from my hand to the recycling bin, something caught my eye:
Character set encoding problems are very common in web sites and web applications, but it is quite unusual to see this type of thing in print. I suppose the ñ character is perhaps meant to be a dash or tilde of some sort, and some sequence of conversion processes from design to print has changed it into the ñ. Perhaps there was a Mac using Mac OS Roman somewhere in the chain.
Transmitting and display of text in web systems suffers the same manner. Begin by agreeing what character sets will be used for the database application and rendered HTML, and then stick to them. Make sure the character set is defined in the application's configuration and defined as a header with every HTML response.
Oh, and HMRC repeated the mistake further into the leaflet too; so there's a problem with proof reading (testing) too!
Posted on: 26 July 2010 at 14:44 hrs
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