[Techtalk] Web page downloads with null characters

[Brenda Bell]

Quoting Telsa Gwynne <hobbit at aloss.ukuu.org.uk>:

> And in Mozilla
> here it looks fine. I tried changing the character encoding in
> View->Character Coding->  but not much happened.
> 
> I don't have any fancy fonts installed, and I have told Mozilla
> nothing special about "use this font". The only change I have
> ever made is to tell it always to have a minimum font size. 

This really got me thinking so I did some more digging.  If you run the URL
(http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/iso-date) through W3C's validator
(http://validator.w3.org/detailed.html), you'll discover that the page has
content type text/html, doc type XHTML and iso-8859-1 encoding.  Why the
validator's output may differ from what your browser tells you is explained
nicely at http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/03/19/dive-into-xml.html.  In
particular, the media type test table at
http://www.w3.org/People/mimasa/test/xhtml/media-types/results might shed
some light on a) whether your browser will handle this document correctly
and b) whether the web server might give you something different depending
on how your browser is identifying itself.

I found this all rather interesting so I tried to display the page in the
various browsers and platforms I have installed so I could compare the
differences in the page info.  You can imagine my surprise when I was able
to display the page correctly in a browser that did not work yesterday. 
According to Netscape, the page was modified yesterday afternoon.

My only conclusion is that whether you can or can not display the page
correctly may well be dependent on when you tried it.

-- 
Brenda
http://opensource.theotherbell.com