[cumbria_lug] Starter for ten...

[Russ Phillips]

guy.murray at boltblue.com wrote:

> Hi,
>    here is a little teaser for you all.
> 
> On writing a web page using Bluefish I typed in a '£' sign and was curious to
> note that Mozilla Thunderbird displayed it as '£'. The same appeared when
> viewing source. I shrugged my shoulders and uploaded it, suspecting a problem
> with Thunderbird.
> 
> Later someone, presumably using M$ IE, noticed the same thing.
> 
> I opened the file on my ISP's control panel editor, found the '£' sitting in
> the html file, deleted the extraneous character and the web page displayed
> correctly.
> 
> Now suspecting Bluefish, I tried it with Gedit and vi, but the same thing happens. 
> 
> What is my ISP's control panel editor seeing which my RH 9/Gnome editors aren't?
> 
> Any ideas?

The £ sign should not just be written into HTML. One of the following 
entities should be used instead:

£
£
£

Apparently, "Browser support is generally best for the decimal character 
references" (ie £), but Firefox 0.8 on Windows works with all 
three, as does IE 6.0

See:
http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/entities/latin1.html
or
http://tinyurl.com/2dy2v

Russ