h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Brilliant brilliant writing, and a shame to have to struggle to read it.

These aren't so much typos as coding errors. You have curly apostrophes, which on my browser appear as question marks. And you have dashes, which also appear as question marks. Make the apostrophes straight, and replace the dashes with the code —.

TRiG.

Sorry: Link: A16832117.

I'll follow that up. What browser do you use Trig, and have you any idea why curly apostrophes would do that?

We've never required any kind of 'house-style' in UG entries but I always thought straight apostrophes were just house-style, not that they were needed for compatibility reasons.
Waz

At the moment I'm using my dad's computer: IE7, XP Home. No problems. Last night I was using my own laptop: Firefox 2, XP Pro. Problems.

This is the reason for the House Style, and so at least these elements of House Style should be adopted for UG entries.

Curley apostrophes are not properly supported in the encoding on h2g2.

TRiG.

TRiG is correct. Those symbols will work on some browsers but not others. Our pages are declared as using the ISO-8859-1 encoding, and those characters are outside the valid range. Windows will probably display them correctly, but it will be heavily browser dependent.

If you definitely want them, you'll have to use the HTML entities for them:

left double quote: “
right double quote: ”
apostrophe: ’

However, it might be better if the underguide adhered to the guidelines for the edited guide, and used normal quote and apostrophe characters.

We're not married to them

And we do used the straight quotes, as a rule - I'm sure this can be ironed out. Many's the night the Polishers get together around the campfire and grumble long into the night about curly quotes. Arrrrrr...

Thanks Jim.

Where can I find those guidelines - I thought they were here http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/SubEditors-GuideML#LINK but I can't see anything that's not tags.

ISO-8859-1 doesn't mean anything to me, I'm afraid, so I'd need something to know what were valid characters.

Ah, so that's where the polishers keep disappearing to.

<./>GuideML-Characters</.>

Note that even something as innocuous as the pound sign can actually cause problems. (I had all sorts of trouble trying to sort out an Edited Entry with some funny codes in it, including a pound sign.)

TRiG.

Campfire...

The only polisher other than you I've seen around in weeks is Broe....

You have, haven't you?



Been throwing them on the fire ... It's not nice, Trin.

_Not_ nice.

And where're we going to get new ones? Huh? We can't just go down Tescos you know. Or Lidls. They don't stock them!

Firefox must be in a good mood. It's showing them fine now. Still, it can cause problems. And I imagine Opera wouldn't like them at all.

TRiG.

Ran out of firelighters. And them littl'uns flame up a treat!

Occasionally with Firefox I get little squares with question marks in - they're definitely not a good idea.

Usually I replace all the dodgy punctuation when I polish... I can think of all sorts of reasons why I wouldn't here but I won't bore you with them all

I'll get it fixed over the weekend.

"it might be better if the underguide adhered to the guidelines for the edited guide"

Surely that would mean we would have two edited guides then

Okay, I think I've gotten everything, does it look better now, TRiG?

Hyphens are better than question marks, but if you want dashes you can use &mdash;. (End with the semi-colon.)

TRiG.

So the polishers are all bar-b-q'd, one way or, , another...


I guess sub-eds know all the problem characters, or rather which characters are ok. Is the info on site? I'd quite like to know for my own sake.

Post 9 in this conversation has the link.

TRiG.

That link tells me the codes for special characters, it doesn't tell me what characters are special and need codes.

How do we know when a - needs a special code.

Btw, a lot of the characters in those tables are just little square boxes this side of this monitor, and some are blank.