I am sure it has happened to all of you. You are browsing a page and you see gibberish characters printed out, maybe where a vocal with tilde was supposed to be...
This is still a very common problem with certain types of printer and certainly with web pages. This is most annoying if you are browsing non english pages and the author does not handle the special characters correctly.
To make special characters and accented letters show up on your pages, use a special set of codes called character entities, which you insert into your HTML code and which your browser will display as the corresponding symbols or characters you want.
The most common character entities have been collected by the International Organization for Standardization and compiled in an ISO Latin Alphabet table, which includes special characters, letters with diacritical marks (accents, umlauts, etc.), and scientific and currency symbols. The Latin-1 table contains 255 characters.
Of course, you don't want to learn the name or number of 255 special characters! So, up until now, verifying and fixing the correct handling of Special Characters has been a painful and slow process. With a new feature of our Online Web Optimization tool this is now a simple task.
When using our Silverlight interface, choose the "Replace Special Characters" task and you will:
- Fix malformed entities: XHTML entities should always begin with an & and end with a ; character. Some browsers render them even when they are not correctly defined, which leads to inconsistencies.
- Replace characters with entities: Non-standard characters such as á, ñ or @ should be defined using named or numerical entities, not directly using the underlying encoding. Depending on what value you choose, encodable entities will be represented using a numbered (select Numbered Entities option) or a named (select Named Entities option) XHTML-based representation.
The product is still in Beta but it is fully functional. Tell us what you think.
By the way, if you like the features of the Online tool, don't be shy and try out the full featured Aggiorno products, the Visual Studio Add In version or the Standalone version.
