

 How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet - prateekdayal
http://douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html

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swombat
Excellent article, well worth a read.

I'll be the one to remark on what a shame it is that Douglas Adams left us in
such an untimely manner, since no one else has done so yet. I'd love to read
his point of view on how things are evolving now, in another five years, or in
a few decades.

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systemtrigger
Pardon this off-topic comment but would anyone happen to know why on pages
like this I see unusual characters in place of punctuation? Screenshots:
<http://s3.amazonaws.com/2009/safari.png>
<http://s3.amazonaws.com/2009/firefox.png>. It doesn't matter which browser I
use or what user account I'm logged in as, my Mac chokes on certain web pages
- the linked article being an example.

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DLWormwood
The page is character encoded in ISO-8859-1, but the web server is reporting
it as UTF-8. (Probably because the web page was written before Unicode became
a common concern of webmasters, it dates back to 1999.)

In Firefox, select View->Character Encoding->Western (ISO-8859-1). In Safari,
select View->Text Encoding->Western European.

(FYI, this shows up this way on Windows systems too. It's not MacRoman or
Windows-1252 to blame this time.)

EDIT: Dang, took too long to write this message to be technically accurate;
several others posted before I did. People who complain about spelling errors
and minor inaccuracies in web posts should be shot...

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systemtrigger
Aha - that fixed it! Thanks, all of you.

