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What's this symbol in Safari?

Benjamindaines

Benjamindaines

macrumors 68030
Original poster
picture1nb1.png


What does that little question mark in the black diamond mean?
 
It's a placeholder for unknown characters. It usually happens when a page's headers say that one character encoding is supposed to be there, but a different encoding was used in the actual text.

Its official Unicode name is "replacement character", FFFD.
 
iMeowbot said:
It's a placeholder for unknown characters. It usually happens when a page's headers say that one character encoding is supposed to be there, but a different encoding was used in the actual text.

Its official Unicode name is "replacement character", FFFD.
Click to expand...

So basically it's the web developer's fault not my computer's?
 
Benjamindaines said:
So basically it's the web developer's fault not my computer's?
Click to expand...
Yep. Some browsers will try to guess the right character set in spite of the headers, but Safari will normally try to go by the book. You can play with the View->Text Encoding menu in Safari to figure out what it's really supposed to be. The most common mismatch is between ISO-8859-1 (aka Latin-1) and UTF-8, but there all kinds of possibilities.
 
Benjamindaines said:
So basically it's the web developer's fault not my computer's?
Click to expand...

That's correct. Although I wish the character looked a little bit, well, more subdued. Say the same weight as Lucida Grande characters. It's quite disctracting if you get a page full of 'em.
 
Alright fixed it. I had a style sheet installed to block myspace ads, apparently that messed it up. On well I'll just have to put up with the screaming ads 🙁
 
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