The document would then be served up in a way that caused it to use the browser's default encoding - which on Windows would be CP1252 so everything looked fine if you were viewing it there, but everywhere else would try to interpret it as something more standard such as ISO-8859-1 and result in the fancy punctuation being rendered as unprintable control characters around and even in the middle of words.
#WHY IS GREEK QUESTION MARK A SEMICOLON FULL#
So you'd get sites that were serving up their HTML pages with Content-Type: text/plain which caused it to show up as a window full of raw HTML code in most web browsers, but the folks authoring those pages and testing them in IE had no idea their server was misconfigured because it looked fine to them.Īnother common problem was that authoring tools on Windows (I think MS Word in particular) would "helpfully" replace quotation marks and apostrophes with fancy curved versions and use the proprietary CP1252 encoding for the text. My "favorite" IE misbehavior was that it would render content as HTML if it looked sort-of like HTML even if the server explicitly labeled it as some other format. Modern versions of IE call this "quirks mode," but quirks mode was all there was for most of the 2000s. Many programmers, in fact, take advantage of this to prank their colleagues by replacing the semicolons in the JavaScript with Greek question marks. IE6 was the height of IE bullshittery, to the point that webdevs had to write entirely different CSS files for IE6 than for everything else, and use various means of trickery to change which styles were applied based on the user agent. Yes, the Greek question mark is the English semicolon and it is used at the end of all direct questions. And all of the undefined behaviours of IE that let all those shit sites work also prevented it from complying with standards properly. Garbage sites plagued the internet, to the point that other browsers couldn't gain a foothold because of all the sites that would only work in IE. ActiveX? Sure! Conflicting script or CSS definitions? Let's use whatever file arrived last, instead of whatever appears last in the code. 13 It was adopted by Church Slavonic and eventually settled on a form essentially similar to the Latin semicolon. It appeared around the same time as the Latin one, in the 8th century.
Internet Explorer embraced the Robustness Principle so well that you could feed it almost pure garbage and it would still generate output. The Greek question mark (Greek:, romanized: ertmatik) looks like. It's also still common knowledge, and a constant thorn in the side of all webdevs. Are you interested in promoting your own content? STOP! Read this first.For posting job listings, please visit /r/forhire or /r/jobbit.
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