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Using iWeb and characters are being added (4 posts)

  • Started 16 years ago by joeldo
  • Latest reply 16 years ago from Scott McGuire
  • joeldo Member

    Using iWeb and characters are being added. I buily my site some time ago and uploded w/ the previous version of Fetch. I recently made a minor adjustment to my site, removed the old one, and uploaded the new. Now there are characters being added to me site. where the space bar was used now a character that resembles the sign for fonts (an upper case A with a line over it) appears. Everything works but it looks AWFUL. If I view the HTML from my desktop folder in Safari it looks fine. When i upload using fetch it adds the characters.
    What to do?

    Posted 16 years ago #

  • Scott McGuire Administrator

    Hi,

    We'd like some more information to help figure out what the problem is.

    Which version of Fetch are you using?

    Are you using the same server for the new site as you did for the old site?

    Did you use iWeb to create the old version of your site?

    And could you please tell us the address (URL) of your website so we can take a look at it?

    Thanks,

    Scott McGuire
    Fetch Softworks

    Posted 16 years ago #

  • joeldo Member

    I am using Fetch 5.2.1 on OS X.4.9. I am using the same server I was when I originally uploaded my site. I did use iWeb to create my site, i merely went in to i and added a URL, deleted the old site, and uploaded the new one. The URL is www.pumpspecialties.com

    thanks

    Originally posted by ScottMcGuire:

    Hi,

    We'd like some more information to help figure out what the problem is.

    Which version of Fetch are you using?

    Are you using the same server for the new site as you did for the old site?

    Did you use iWeb to create the old version of your site?

    And could you please tell us the address (URL) of your website so we can take a look at it?

    Thanks,

    Scott McGuire
    Fetch Softworks

    Posted 16 years ago #

  • Scott McGuire Administrator

    Hi,

    Thanks for the additional information.

    The explanation of what's going on is, unfortunately, rather long, and there is not an easy fix.

    The short version: iWeb is using special characters to format your webpages, and your web server is not displaying them correctly. (This is not a problem caused by Fetch.) In particular on your page, iWeb 1.1.2 uses non-breaking spaces for formatting - those are the cause of all the accented "A" characters you see. Non-breaking spaces are what you get if you type Option-space; while they look exactly the same as regular spaces in many applications, they really are different characters.

    I believe you didn't have this problem with the original version of your webpage because the original version was done with the very first version of iWeb, which did not insert non-breaking spaces all over the place. For the new version of your webpage, you used the latest updated version of iWeb (1.1.2), which uses the non-breaking spaces.

    So why do the non-breaking spaces appear incorrectly on your webapge? This is the part where there's a long explanation.

    Most webpages have what's called a "character encoding" (also known as a "text encoding") which tells web browsers which character set the page is using, so that the web browser will display the characters on the page properly.

    This is important if your webpage is written in a foreign language with accented characters (or non-Roman characters, such as Japanese or Arabic), but can also affect the display of some special characters that iWeb uses when creating webpages, such as the non-breaking spaces. If you view the source of a webpage, you can usually see the character encoding listed as one of the first lines.

    iWeb creates pages in the "UTF-8" character encoding, and properly labels them as such, which is good because they include special characters that only display properly when using the UTF-8 encoding. The problem is that your webpage is being displayed by browsers as if it had a different character encoding, which makes the non-breaking spaces display incorrectly, appearing as extraneous characters.

    If you go to your webpage in Safari, go to the View menu, go to the Text Encoding submenu, and choose "Unicode (UTF-8)," your webpage will be redrawn and everything will display correctly. That's good, but not very helpful, because you don't want everyone to have to manually choose the encoding to see your pages correctly. (You haven't actually made a change to the webpage by choosing this option, you've only changed how Safari is displaying it on your computer.) However, this shows that the files have actually be uploaded correctly.

    The correct encoding should be chosen automatically in Safari, since iWeb has correctly labeled your pages as UTF-8. (If a webpage does not list the encoding to use, that can lead to problems, but that's not what's going on here.) Unfortunately, some web servers override the settings specified by individual webpages, and force all pages on the server to be displayed in a specific character encoding, regardless of what character encoding the individual webpages say they should be displayed with. This appears to be what your server is doing, even though that is poor behavior.

    You should contact your hosting company and ask them to fix this problem. You need to tell them that your pages specify a character encoding of UTF-8, but the web server is forcing them to be displayed as ISO Latin 1. Hopefully they'll understand. Don't let them tell you that you uploaded the files incorrectly; I can assure you that you did not.

    Unfortunately, if they cannot or will not fix the problem, there isn't much you can do except find a different server to use. There are no settings you can change in iWeb to keep it from using the non-breaking spaces and special characters that cause the problem.

    (And while there is a character encoding option in Fetch, like Safari's "Text Encoding" menu, that option only changes how Fetch displays files and filenames - it does not actually change how Fetch uploads or downloads files.)

    I hope this makes sense, and please let us know if you have further questions or need clarifications.

    Thanks,

    Scott McGuire
    Fetch Softworks

    [This message has been edited by ScottMcGuire (edited 08-15-2007).]

    Posted 16 years ago #

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