[WikiEN-l] Speaking of Apple Mac and Wikipedia

Sat Jan 29 14:18:29 UTC 2005

On Jan 28, 2005, at 2:40 AM, slimvirgin at gmail.com wrote:

> Has anyone else noticed the following? Often, though not always, when
> I edit a page containing accents like umlauts and acutes, when I press
> "preview" or "save," the accents come out mangled: for example, a "u"
> with an umlaut above it, comes out as a weird-looking Y, and it
> happens to words I haven't edited. In addition to changing the letter,
> this breaks the links to pages with accents in the title, leaving red
> links. I was told this happened with Macs, and I use a Mac, but I've
> only noticed it myself in the last week or so. Is there anything I can
> do my end to stop it from happening? I use OS 10.2.8 and the browser
> is usually Safari 1.0.3.

It's a character set mismatch, and older Safari was especially 
susceptible to that problem.  Usually it's an ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) page 
interpreted as Unicode, or vice versa. You can use the View->Text 
Encoding menu to tweak it for a single page, and you can change the 
default in the preferences (Appearance section).  It still may not be 
100% reliable, though. Apple seems to treat Safari more as a test bed 
for Web libraries than a production browser.  As others suggested, one 
of the Mozilla family might be a good substitute.