After a short email back and forth, I wanted to post an apology to Håkon. It sounds like he was trying to say something quite different from the way he was quoted and I should have given him the benefit of the doubt before posting.
I read Håkon's quote as suggesting that Firefox wasn't really that successful, except maybe with Open Source people, and that Firefox couldn't be counted on to continue its successes.
What Håkon was trying to say, I understand, was that with Microsoft's control of the operating system, it's terribly difficult for all of the non-IE browsers to compete and that Firefox, even with the successes it's seen, has had a much more difficult time than it would have if Microsoft was not abusing it's monopoly in operating systems.
That I can completely agree with. Sorry for the misunderstanding and my somewhat snide response, Håkon.
Posted by: Ferdinand | December 18, 2007 4:36 AM
Ferdinand, I don't have the original source. Hakon says it was condensed from a long interview and without an actual recording of that interview, I'm willing to take his word that he was somewhat misquoted.
- A
Posted by: Asa Dotzler | December 18, 2007 9:00 AM
Asa, your blog does not really support Unicode since it uses unicode entities to display Hâkon's name : håkon
Problem is that these entities are stripped out/or dispayed uninterpreted in your RSS feed, which is probably a bug of your blogging system
Posted by: pascalc | December 18, 2007 9:09 AM
Pascal, yeah. I think it's a problem that I can't correct since it's with the larger mozillazine.org site. If you (or anyone else) knows how I can correct it without help from the mozillazine folks, please let me know.
- a
Posted by: Asa Dotzler | December 18, 2007 9:34 AM
I've actually been messing around with character sets and MIME types on the site recently (as in, at the weekend and just now).
For a long time, we've had a problem where send a HTTP header declaring a character encoding of ISO-8859-1 with most pages served from the site. This works fine for the majority of MozillaZine pages (which really are ISO-8859-1) but not for Movable Type weblogs, which are UTF-8.
Both the webpages and the feeds for Asa's weblog should now be declared as UTF-8 (the RSS/Atom feeds should also have more suitable MIME types now), which should go some way towards alleviating the character encoding complaints. Unfortunately, I think this may make archived pages worse, as the I believe comments entered into pages declared as ISO-8859-1 would have been stored in the database as ISO-8859-1 and won't display properly now we claim everything is UTF-8).
Asa, when you enter a word like "Håkon" (fingers crossed that the previous word comes out okay), do you encode the character or enter it literally? If the former, try the latter (it should work okay now that we're declaring the encoding correctly, assuming I'm not overlooking any database issues).
If there's still no joy, it may be a bug in Movable Type or some other misconfiguration. Character encoding is hard.
Posted by: Alex Bishop | December 18, 2007 2:38 PM
So how about linking to the original source so we can read for our selves?