Questionmarks inside black diamonds

I don't know if I'm putting this in the right forum, but since I'm using NS 7.1 and the experience happened while I was using NS, I'll try here first.

Twice today, for the first time ever, I've encountered some text in which are scattered black diamonds inside of which are white questionmarks.

The first time was in a lengthy e-mail from a friend, who uses AOL on his Mac. Just one sentence in it contained those marks. The second time was a few minutes while I was surfing the Web. One site contained some images and some text, and scattered throughout the latter were those black diamonds with a questionmark inside each one.

Anybody else ever see those things? Any idea what causes them?

 

I did a groups.google search on Netscape "black diamonds" "question mark" and found the answer in this newsgroup post:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=...pe&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&btnG=Google+Search
==================copy/paste=====================
When my Preferences -> Navigator -> Languages -> Default Character
Coding specifies 'UTF-8', View -> Page Info -> Encoding claims
this page is encoded in 'UTF-8', and mozilla shows the accented
characters on this page as black diamonds enclosing a question mark.

When my Preferences -> Navigator -> Languages -> Default Character
Coding specifies 'Western ISO-8859-1', View -> Page Info ->
Encoding claims this page is encoded in 'ISO-8859-1', and mozilla
shows the correct accented glyphs for those same characters.
==================end c/p=================

Check your Preferences -> Navigator -> Languages and see what it says under Default Character Codiing. I show Western ISO-8859-1

 

Alice: Thanks for replying. Mine shows the same thing as yours, although the ISO-8859-1 part is in parentheses. I assume that doesn't make any difference. Same thing in View\Page Info, but without the parentheses.

If that's the correct setting, why am I still getting those black diamonds? And why are they just in some places in a forwarded e-mail letter and not in other places in it and not in other sources of text? Getting them is not a great big deal, but they're distracting and I'd just as soon they weren't appearing. And I'm curious why I'd never gotten any before yesterday but then I got them in one message and also in the midst of some text at a Web site. Do I need to change a configuration setting someplace?

 

Could be an error in the coding on the page or possibly a BUG in Netscape/Mozilla. I did a bugzilla search and found over 100 internationalization bugs for the search term "character ":
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist...er&field0-0-0=noop&type0-0-0=noop&value0-0-0=

Do you have a URL for a webpage that gives you those errors? Not sure about the e-mail errors. Is it only from one person?

Mine too

 

Alice: I'm not perfectly clear what you mean by "Do you have a URL that gives you those errors?" I looked over the list of URLs in the link you provided, and I didn't recognize any of them. Is that what I was supposed to do?

Man, there sure are a lot of known bugs (100) in Mozilla. Are they all in NS 7.1's version of Mozilla (that's what I'm running)?

Do I do anything now, or just wait for a fix to the suspected bug, whichever one it is?

 

I must have read your mind. I was just editing my reply while you were posting.

I would like a URL to one of the webpages where you see question marks in black diamonds.

Almost forgot to answer that! I redid my bugzilla seach and found over 100 bugs just searching internationalization on the word "character" but those would be for all builds. I didn't try just on Mozilla 1.4 which would be Netscape 7.1. I'm not really that good on bugzilla searches!

 

Alice: You don't want to spend too much time reading my mind. There's some stuff in there you'd probably be better off not being exposed to.

As I said in an earlier post, one of the 2 places where I saw those black diamonds was in something forwarded in an e-mail from a friend, so I can't give you a URL for that one. I'll have to do a little searching for the Web site where I saw the other diamonds last night. Back ASAP.

 

OK, I found it. I'd been surfing in the google\images for scenics associated with the Romantic poets Coleridge and Wordsworth. Get to the first site containing the black diamonds by using this URL:

http://hometown.aol.com/pateaden/myhomepage/writing.html

If it doesn't work, go to google.com and click on the Images tab, type in "wordsworth," scroll down to the bottom of the page and navigate yourself to page 24. There, scroll down to the third row of thumbnails, the third one from the left should be titled "country inn.gif." Click on it, then click on the URL at the top of the new window that begins half-way down the page. When that opens, scroll down that page (titled "Other Rooms ") and you should see lots of scattered black diamonds with a question mark in each one. At least I do.

Can you get to the right page? What do you see there?

 

I'm now thinking that maybe the character encoding angle was a false lead, since I don't see any foreign or unusual characters on the page.

Here is a copy/paste from the text on that page. Could you tell me where specifically you see the question marks? I'm now thinking it could be an image blocking or adblocking mechanism at work. I don't have Netscape 7.1 or Mozilla 1.4 installed so I;m not really the best person to help.... hopefilly someone else will check the page, too.

============copy/paste=============

Other Rooms
Country Inn In The Cotswolds, England

William Wordsworth (1770 "“ 1850) seemed out of step with colleagues in his native England. He graduated from Cambridge in 1791 and immediately left for France. It was the most turbulent time of the French revolution. Just before the climax to the revolution, the execution of King Louis XVI, he returned to England full of ideals of realistic humanitarianism, democratic liberalism, and a pagan and thoroughly pantheistic worship of nature. In his later years, he settled into a more contented and orthodox life and eventually became the Poet Laureate of England, but his best work had been already written.

His belief that God is in all things is reflected in this poem:

LINES WRITTEN IN EARLY SPRING

I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts,
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure ----
But the least motion which they made,
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from Heaven be sent,
If such be Nature’s holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man.
………………………………………………………………………………………………

I particularly liked some of Wordsworth’s poetry because of his ability to "paint pictures" with his words; to make the reader actually experience what was being described. In his poem, "LINES COMPOSED A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY," he observes some rows of hedges, which are common in England, cutting across green fields like living fences:

. . . Once again I see
These hedgerows, hardly hedgerows,
Little lines of sportive wood run wild . . . .
………………………………………………………………………………………………

Wordsworth wrote the following poems in Germany in 1799. They are fragments of a series of poems written about a girl named Lucy. Her identity is unknown:

She dwelt among untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
Fair as a star when only one
Is shining in the sky.

..................................................
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 "“ 1834)

Coleridge had been a close friend of Wordsworth but, over time, their growing political and religious differences interfered and they drifted apart. Coleridge, like Wordsworth, was a romantic and also had the gift of using words to create very real scenarios in the reader’s mind. Some fine examples of this can be found in "THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER." In this story the mariner describes how he shot an albatross, a symbol of good luck to seamen, and he and his shipmates were punished by being stranded in their sailing vessel on a windless and frightening sea:

All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the moon.

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.

Revolution & Romance; Pride & Arrogance

In the first century B.C., a Greek historian, Diodorus Siculus, told of a gigantic statue of a king named Ozymandias which bore this inscription: "I am Ozymandias, King of Kings; if any man wishes to know what I am and where I am buried, let him surpass me in some of my achievements.â€

In 1817;1818, the English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, put this in its proper perspective:

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless
things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.â€
__________________________________________________
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON (1809 "“ 1892)

Tennyson lived in the heart of the Victorian Era. From the beginning, he was a romanticist, but in 1833 he was deeply shocked by the death of a good friend, Arthur Hallam, who was also his sister Emily’s fiance’. He set to work examining his grief in a chain of 131 lyrics that he titled "IN MEMORIUM" which he published in 1850. During this time, he also worked on a series of poems, in blank verse, based on the legends of King Arthur ( "THE IDYLLS OF THE KING ") and classical stories of "ULYSSES" and "THE LOTOS-EATERS" from Homer’s "Odyssey ". In many of these poems, he reflected, in memorable language, the sentiments, beliefs, and thoughts of Victorian England. It was a time of great scientific awakening and some of the emerging theories, such as the evolution espoused by Darwin, seemed to run head-on into the old and comfortable religious beliefs. Take a comfortable seat, and I’ll try to show you what I mean:

IN MEMORIUM (1833)

Prologue:
Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen Thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove.
. . . .
Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of Thee,
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they.
. . . .
Forgive what seemed my sin in me,
What seemed my worth since I began;
For merit lives from man to man,
And not from man, O Lord, to Thee. . . . .
--------------------------------------------------
And, in a reference to Darwin’s theory of "survival of the fittestâ€:

Lyric 55:
Are God and nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life.
--------------------------------------------------
In "THE LOTOS-EATERS," the poet tells of the mystical island in "The Odyssey," where the sailors of Odysseus ate of the "Lotos honeyed fruit" and wished to stay there rather than return to their homes. I think it’s one of the most beautiful descriptions of place in poetry. The "Lotos" of course refers to the lotus plant which, in ancient Greek legend produced a fruit that could induce a state of dreamy forgetfullness, but he ends referring to the poppy which is the source of opium, used frequently by some in Victorian society:

A land of streams! Some like a downward smoke,
Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go;
And some through wavering lights and shadows broke,
Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below.
. . . .
There is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass,
Or night-dews on still waters b

The End of a An Era

As I prepare to wander out of the Victorian Age, I want to pay tribute to works of a few more poets of this era because of the singular pleasure and inspiration which they provided me.

DOVER BEACH (Matthew Arnold: 1867)

The sea is calm tonight,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;---on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air.

Only from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! You hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and seize, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
....
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
__________________________________________________

SONG (Christina Rossetti: 1830-1894)

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree.
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.
--------------------------------------------------
[Continued in "The End of An Era" (click below)]
If you have any comments, please contact me at: caedmon670@aol.com

The Writing of Francis Eaden

Caedmon's Bistro
At Home and Away
The End of an Era
My Favorite Products
Free AOL! Try It Out Today!
Free AOL! Try It Out Today!


Download AIMAIM RemoteSend me an Instant MessageAdd me to Your Buddy ListJoin my Chat RoomSend me an EmailAdd Remote to Your Page
Download AOL Instant Messenger

page created with 1-2-3 Publish

============end copy/paste============

 

Alice: It would be a pretty clumsy task to show where all the odd characters are, the text being so long, but I did some closer looking at where in the text those marks appear. They seem to be anywhere that a correct copy shows a hypen (maybe it's a dash) or a smart quote (either single or double). A regular (unsmart? dumb?) quotation mark doesn't do it, and appears for me as it should.

Does that provide any useful clues?

 

Now we're back to character coding!
You mean you can't see the dashes in this line, on the page in question?

The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure ----

Or the quotation marks here?

In "THE LOTOS-EATERS," the poet tells of the mystical island in "The Odyssey,"

I don't know what you mean by smart quotes.

II did a right-click the page, chose This Frame... View frame source. The font used is:
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

That's the only clue I see but it doesn't ring any bells.

You can compare your settings in Edit Preferences Appearance Fonts and see if you have what I have:

Fonts for ...Western

Proportional: Serif
Serif:___________Times New Roman
Sans-Serif_______Arial
Cursive_________Comic Sans MS
Fantasy (greyed out)
Monospace______Currier New

The checkbox,
"ALLOW DOCUMENTS TO USE OTHER FONTS" is checked.

Hope that helps!

 

Alice: I see the 4 hyphens there, and that's what makes me think that it's a dash that causes the black diamonds to appear. And I see those quotationmarks, too.

This BBS site doesn't display smart quotes, but only the other kind ( "), where the marks are vertical and plain. Smart quotes are curved, not straight, looking more like the styles used in magazines, etc. MS Word and most other word processors can be set to produce them. ASCII codes 0147 and 0148 should produce them if the default setting doesn't already do it. ASCII codes 0150 and 0151 should produce the short and long dashes, respectively. That Web site apparently shows them to you but not to me. I get the black diamonds.

I looked again at the URL for the page at that site, and I notice that a part of it is aol.com. Is that of any significance?

My Preferences\Fonts settings are the same as yours except that Fantasy shows Algerian instead of being grayed out. The box below all that is checked, too, like yours is.

 

In Wordpad, using the key combination ALT+ keypad numbers:
ALT+0150 produced a single dash/hyphen "“
Alt 0151 produced a character that looked like a long dash "”
Alt+0147 produced a left-sided curved smart quote "
Alt+0148 produced the right-sided curved smart quote "

Just like you said it would.

I went to the page again and did an Edit, Find in Page and typed in Alt+0147 and found a number of lines using the left-sided smart quote, for example, :
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
And, in a reference to Darwin’s theory of "survival of the fittestâ€:

Using Edit, Find in page, and entering ALT+0151 I found nothing at all for that second long dash/hyphen symbol.
Using Alt+0150 I found only these for the first dash/hyphen symbol
William Wordsworth (1770 "“ 1850)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 "“ 1834)
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON (1809 "“ 1892)

I opened the Windows Character Map and. although I could hardly make out the symbols there, I found another special character that liooks like a dash: Alt+0173 _
Doing a Find in page on that, I found nothing. I also checked the charts at http://www.jaques.demon.co.uk/htx/asc1.htm and http://www.jaques.demon.co.uk/htx/asc2.htm
but didn't see any other possible symbols for a hyphen or dash .

So, again, where exactly do you see the question marks on the problem page, other than at the smart quotes?

I also noticed that the e-mail and problem page were both created in AOL. I thought it was a coincidence. but maybe not?

Have you tried the page in Internet Explorer? If you have the same problem there then it is definitely a Windows issue, not a Netscape issue, and I wouldpost a new question in the appropriate Windows forum for your OS or in the Internet Explorer forum.

PS can you see the smart quotes I entered in this post
"like this" ? The seem to be curved in the normal font size, but if I increase the page font using View, Text Zoom then they look straight, but angled in. Strange.

 

Alice: Yes, I was able to see the smart (curved) quotes in your latest reply. Then I followed your suggestion and opened IE and went to that Web site's page again, and found no black diamonds at all! That's VERY interesting. So, to make sure, I went to the same site page with NS, and sure enough, the black diamonds are still there when I'm using NS. Hmmmm.

I'd say we're getting close to pinning down the source of the problem.

Just to make things even more intriguing, I've noticed three times in the past few days that e-mails I've gotten from two different people, both Mac users, are appearing at my end with line break problems. The lines break in such a way that they go their normal length (width?) and then one or two or three words get dropped down to another line all by themselves, then another line of text begins below that real short line and the same thing happens with it. Is that a separate problem, or are they tied together somehow?

 

Alice (or anybody else): I just tried something interesting. I was getting more and more suspicious of NS 7.1 itself as we performed all those tests and experiments. I hadn't had that problem with black diamonds appearing when I was still using NS 7.02. I wondered how MS 7.02 would do. I still had it installed, so I opened it and went to that same Web page, and whaddaya know -- no black diamonds! Right now I'm thinking that NS 7.1, with its newer version of Mozilla, has some bugs in it that are causing the black diamond problem.

I'm thinking seriously of going back to 7.02. I'm not noticing the resource drain that some members have reported experiencing with NS 7.1, but I also haven't noticed anything working better.

Do the results I mentioned above confirm my suspicions? Any big reason(s) to not abandon NS 7.1 at least for the time being and use NS 7.02 instead?

 

Sure does seem to be a Netscape 7.1 bug. Hopefully someone else with Netscape 7.1 or Mozilla 1.4 is reading this and will test the page and maybe give you reasons why you should not switch back to Netscape 7.02.

 

It didn't dawn on me before but.....
Since you say you have both Netscape 7.02 and 7.1 installed you installed 7.1 to a separate folder which is good, but you might be sharing the same profile, which in some cases is not so good.

Try creating a new Netscape 7.1 profile, and see if you still have the same problems. To do so, either open the Netscape 7.1 profile manager from your start programs menu shortcut, or add a space and -ProfileManager to the path in your Netscape 7.1 program shortcut (or get there from start run {path to NS7.1} -ProfileManager)

Since a new profile will result in a fresh set of user files and preferences it might just do the trick. Worth a shot.

 

regards command line switch "-ProfileManager "- a simple -p works equally as well,it is not case sensitive.

refers to NS 7.1/Moz 1.4f

regards:

 

Hi BOBBO,

I don't know what your progress is on the "black diamond effect ". There is a thread on the Netscape 7 Newsgroup, where a user is having the identical problem. Wasn't sure if this was you posting or not:
snews://secnews.netscape.com:563/3F1C8E3A.1060401@pbgdashtranslations.com

Ramona

 

Hi Ramona and captjlddavis

Could either of you check the page at http://hometown.aol.com/pateaden/myhomepage/writing.html
with Netscape 7.1?

Also the page at http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS8536922336.html referenced in Ramona's NG thread.

Any question marks showing up for you in the text?

I tried running both pages through the W3C MarkUp Validator at http://validator.w3.org/ (suggested by another poster to the netscape7 thread) but got these rrors:

First link:
================copy/paste=================
Sorry! A fatal error occurred when attempting to transcode the character encoding of the document. Either we do not support this character encoding yet, or you have specified a non-existent character encoding (often a misspelling).

The detected character encoding was "shift_jis,iso-8859-1 ".

The error was " ".
===========end c/p============

Second link:
===========copy/paste==========
I was not able to extract a character encoding labeling from any of the valid sources for such information. Without encoding information it is impossible to validate the document.
============end c/p============