Blurred vision at Beeld
I have repeatedly been disappointed by the low standards at Beeld (an Afrikaans daily with wide distribution including the area I live in). Apart from language issues that surprise at times, they fall far short of my expectations on the technical side as well. I recently encountered a problem with their character encoding — the reason I'm writing now.
This is by no means the first problem I encounter at Beeld. I have seen several problems with the RSS feed, for example that a heading spans over a few lines, or that letters with diacritical marks come through as HTML entities. Furthermore they only give 10 entries at a time, but seems to publish a whole bunch each morning at the same time, with the result that I only get the last ten in my RSS reader. I guess hyphenation marks and spelling errors in the web version might be attributed to a greater focus on the print edition. However, one would hope that they would at least manage the most simple parts of HTML for the web site, such as the character encoding. It seems not to be the case.
I recently changed my default encoding on my browser to UTF-8 — a technical issue that would interest few people. For Firefox we put the default on ISO-8859-1 for Afrikaans which I believe is a very good default value. This setting only applies when viewing documents that don't specify an encoding. For me this mostly happens when I view attachments in Bugzila, and most things that I look at in my day to day browsing is in UTF-8. Hence my choice. Since then Beeld's motto unfortunately looks like this:
Similar problems appear at a few places on the front page. You can search for "Vroe?re Stories". I quickly confirmed that Beeld's pages don't specify an encoding at all. The interesting thing is that the pages seem to mostly use ASCII with HTML-entities for diacritical marks.
Have a look at the complaints of Feedvalidator about Beeld's RSS and the W3C's HTML validator about the front page itself. One would expect that they would at least check this from time to time and try to address the worst problems.
For now I'm trying automatic detection of encoding in the hope that it is not too slow.
Comments
Default encoding
I'm always oscillating between UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 in my browser's default encoding. I see a lot of UTF-8 plain text files as well, specially message catalogs, but IIRC according to the HTML standard the default encoding is ISO-8859-1, and some lazy web sites rely on that and don't declare their encoding.