Help! Trouble with French characters?

[tartanarmy@bigfoot.com]

I am having a dog of a time. I have 2 pages that use version 5 of the menu.

the 2 pages use exactly the same code except 1 page uses french labels for the menu and the other english.

the french one http://dev.fredericton.ca/fb1.asp crashes IE (5.5 and 6) while the english one http://dev.fredericton.ca/eb1.asp does not.

the crash will occur if you wait on the page for a few seconds or if you move around the menu. it is very strange.

both work fine in NS. I scoured the pages for roque characters that may interfere with the workings of the page, but i can not find anything. It's probably ovious to someone.

I am using a licensed version (of the latest release) of the software.

any thoughts?

[Maz]

There was an earlier thread about certain foreign characters, did you see that one? Or was it working before and now its not?

maz

[John]

I'm not seeing a problem in OS X/Safari. The accented characters look just fine. Not having a Windoze machine cranked up here at home I can't look at it that way.

In your menu code I am seeing the actual accented characters. However, it might be necessary to code these special characters; e.g., currently you have...

Code: Select all

aI("text=Ingénierie et travaux publics;showmenu=8;");

You might have to do this...

Code: Select all

aI("text=Ingénierie et travaux publics;showmenu=8;");

Just a guess at this point.

[Ruth]

I have ie 5.5 on win98se and the menu is fine. I even clicked all around it and all over the page and waited about 5 minutes before I clicked the menu itself. The links worked, and the pagematch worked
Ruth

[tartanarmy@bigfoot.com]

Thanks for your ideas.

I haven't seen the thread on foreign characters, i will check that out.

thanks for the tip on é i will try that out this morning and let you all know.

All our machines are win2k winXP . I had no idea about win98se. Thank you.

[John]

Remind me not to touch that *$&#%@^& link again! Here at work, with the oh-so-wonderful XP "Pro"/IE6, your 'bad' link does indeed crash IE6 big-time. Blows it completely out of the water. Tried it twice now (dumb, but it's early here). The first time it dumped when I hit one of the menu items with an accented character. The second time it didn't even get the page fully loaded and blew off.

Your 'good' link, as you indicated, works fine.

[Andy]

I've some good news and some bad news.

The good news (at least for me) is that it's NOT the menu - I've copied your website, uploaded it to our dev server, loaded it up with the menu - It crashed, BIG TIME! - I then removed ALL references to the menu and again it crashed - it took a bit longer but it still crashed (try it for yourself and you'll see).

The bad news is that after backtracking i've found that it's related to your DOCTYPE - remove it and hey presto, no crash. Put it back in, it crashes.

Now, my guess is that the DOCTYPE you've used is English only the bit that says Transitional//EN kinda gives the game away but as I'm no expert of DOCTYPES so I really can't say for sure.

In fact, I know absolutely nothing about DOCTYPES, I don't know why they were invented, what they are for or what benefit they give (if somebody could elaborate that would be great) All I know is that they have caused more problems than they solve. I've never used them and, as long as I can get away with it, I never will.

I know I'm a bit of maverick when it comes to standards but when you look at how some of the biggest (most popular) websites in the World do things you have to sit back and think "WHY?" Like, Microsoft is pretty big and they don't use DOCTYPES and they seem to do alright. OK I hear you shout "BUT THEY MAKE THEIR OWN STANDARDS!!" Point taken - what about Google then? -- Nuff said eh? I also like the way Google omit the quotes around properties, that's another "why bother, it's a waste of bandwidth" but that's just my humble opinon.

Sorry I went off on one, it's just that the menu gets the blame for lots of things when it really doesn't deserve it.

Cheers
Andy

[John]

While I agree with most of what you said, boss, I was not blaming the menu (note my post about it working in Safari with no problems). If anything, I was blaming M$.

Here are a few doctype refs...

http://www.w3.org/QA/2002/04/valid-dtd-list.html
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/doctype/
http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/doctype.html

[tartanarmy@bigfoot.com]

You guys absolutely rock.

Thank you so much. I fully expected it to be something unrelated to the menu cause it worked very well in NS, english and different OS's. I found some bogus office code in that page as well. Took out all references to MS, doctypes and MS office...............works like a charm.

thanks for all your help guys!
Feel free to add my post to the "Why i hate Microsoft" pages.

[John]

You guys absolutely rock.

We try!

Thank you so much. I fully expected it to be something unrelated to the menu cause it worked very well in NS, english and different OS's. I found some bogus office code in that page as well. Took out all references to MS, doctypes and MS office...............works like a charm.

Note that when I looked at it in NS I didn't see all the accented characters (at least I 'think' I didn't). Double check.

Feel free to add my post to the "Why i hate Microsoft" pages.

I thought those pages were all filled up

[Maz]

I don't get doc types either, but obviously using en=english is probably not good. Character encoding UTF-8 will allow any character.

Trouble is its impossible to use w3 validation without the doctypes. I understood that there were screen readers that like validation use the doctypes.

I'm still not sure what quirksmode is, apparently I have it. But so long as it works and validates I'm not going to worry about it. Because it means removing xml prologue and I think I need that for some of the backend stuff.

http://www.santagata.us/characters/Char ... ities.html

maz

[John]

I don't get doc types either, but obviously using en=english is probably not good.

I'm not sure where the fine line falls. If you use é for something (say 'resume'), does that automatically make you a non-en page? I don't think so, because I've got that all over the place and all my pages are 'en'. I think using the code as opposed to the actual high-ascii character allows for 'en' use.

Character encoding UTF-8 will allow any character.

JS saved that way will blow up. We've seen this before. Must be straight text/ASCII only.

I'm still not sure what quirksmode is, apparently I have it. But so long as it works and validates I'm not going to worry about it. Because it means removing xml prologue and I think I need that for some of the backend stuff.

That's there (xml) because you're writing XHTML.

I don't get quirksmode, either.

[Ruth]

Kudos Andy, I'm with you. You're right up there with the big guys which [warning: no doctype specified] Microsoft.com, NetworkSolutions, Macromedia.

Ruth

[John]

Unfortunately, in education (and a lot of other industries, I know), accessiblity is a must, and without the doctype, as Maz mentioned, the silly W3C won't validate.

I think, as the standards start to narrow and settle down, eventually browsers will require it.

[Ruth]

Narrow? Settle Down? The consortium would be putting themselves out of a job. I'm probably going to raise some hackles here, but, just a personal opinion, the best way to solve accessibility is for those developers of readers to work a bit and design a good one. Which makes more sense, develop a reasonable reader or try to make sure that millions of websites by millions of individuals, small businesses, big businesses learn a whole new field of study oh, let's make it 2 or three fields, html or whichever is used, css, standards, just to try and figure out how to make a site 'compliant'. Wonder where tvs would be today if the direction had been to require all programs to be compliant by putting text at the bottom of every scene, leave it on long enough to be read, etc, instead of the televisions being made to provide that capability to whomever wanted it?

Ruth

[John]

My, my - need another nap, do we

However, I do agree that the readers do leave something to be desired. Everybody has his own idea of how it should work, and, unfortunately, that makes it as royal pain to try and develop sites. Such - I guess - is life.