Tag Archives: UTF-8

On the importance of online copy-editing

Came upon this article at Macleans.ca about online gambling in Kahnawake, and noticed what appeared to be a strange typo in the headline:

Maclean’s encoding error

As of this writing, it’s still not corrected, which I guess means that nobody at Maclean’s checks articles once they’ve gone online.

Here’s how the end of that headline appears in the HTML code:

Even if it means starting a fight.

So it’s not my browser. It explicitly says “lowercase i with umlaut, mathematical negation symbol, and non-existent character with code #129.” My browser just did what it was told.

But why did this happen? For that we have to delve into two technical subjects I’ll do my best to explain: Unicode and ligatures.

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