Non-breaking spaces in <select> lists in UTF-8

Thread view:

Enable EMail Alerts

Start New Thread

Thread rating:

Sacha Mallais - 21 Oct 2003 19:01 GMT

Hello,

I'm having a problem getting my Mac IE 5.2.2 under OSX (10.2) to
display select lists that have options with non-breaking spaces when
the encoding is UTF-8. Here is an example:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>

<body><form>
<select size="1" name="blah">
<option value="-1">default</option>
<option value="0">Option 0</option>
<option value="1">  Option 1</option>
<option value="2">  Option 2</option>
</select>
</form></body>

Options 1 & 2 don't display when clicking the select list.

I've googled extensively for solutions to this problem and have tried
various options (different character encodings work, but I need
UTF-8), but I'm at the end of my rope. Does anyone have any ideas?

sacha

Reply to this Message

Andreas Prilop - 22 Oct 2003 18:02 GMT

> I'm having a problem getting my Mac IE 5.2.2 under OSX (10.2) to
> display select lists that have options with non-breaking spaces when
> the encoding is UTF-8. Here is an example:

Please don't give examples but URLs. Provide a minimal document that
illustrates your point.

Signature

Top posting.
What's the most irritating thing on Usenet?

Reply to this Message

Sacha Mallais - 25 Oct 2003 18:50 GMT

> Please don't give examples but URLs. Provide a minimal document that
> illustrates your point.

Here is the above HTML in a web page:
http://sacha.global-village.net/macie.html

sacha

Reply to this Message

Andreas Prilop - 27 Oct 2003 19:12 GMT

> Here is the above HTML in a web page:
> http://sacha.global-village.net/macie.html

Start by making your source text valid:
<http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://sacha.global-village.net/macie.html>

Signature

Top posting.
What's the most irritating thing on Usenet?

Reply to this Message

Sacha Mallais - 28 Oct 2003 20:13 GMT

> Start by making your source text valid:
> <http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://sacha.global-village.net/macie.html>

Damn. Of course, you're right. I've fixed the page so that it
validates as 4.01 Transitional now.

sacha

Reply to this Message

S Page - 28 Oct 2003 23:56 GMT

> I'm having a problem getting my Mac IE 5.2.2 under OSX (10.2) to
> display select lists that have options with non-breaking spaces when
> the encoding is UTF-8.

Me too, exactly as you describe! It seems any character that is not
simple 7-bit ASCII will prevent the ENTIRE option element from
appearing. You just see an empty line in the pop-up list. Thus &
seems to be OK, but accented characters and extended Unicode aren't.
(A non-breaking space is actually a special character 00A0 or &#160 in
Unicode.)

I've tried using named entities, using numbered entities, using the
raw glyph, leaving out the content-language, specifying XHTML DTD,
specifying nothing, changing the font in MSIE Preferences, etc. None
helps. The workarounds I've found are:

* Switch to a multiple select (no pop-up).
* Tell the user to choose View > Character Set > User-Defined from
the MSIE menu.
* Abandon UTF-8 and use a different encoding.

One other thing to try is to to use CSS to specify a different font
for the select list. I haven't tried that yet.

John Daine and "Lars" had this problem last year in news article
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3E801C03.4020400%40swing.be and
they got no workaround or confirmation.

This sure is a serious bug, I'm surprised it doesn't show up anywhere
on the Internet but newsgroups.

Cheers,
--
=S

Reply to this Message

Mac Forum / Applications / Internet Explorer / October 2003

Non-breaking spaces in <select> lists in UTF-8