Why do PC users hate Mac users? Is it the Mac people’s smug self-righteous attitude that they must know better than 95% of the computer users? Is it because they think they are Sooooo…. smart for choosing an overpriced piece of artsy hardware? Or is it because the PC users are tired of being told how easy it is to use a Mac (fallacy) and that PC’s are so hard to use, never work right, and are always crashing?
Well, if a Mac is so easy to use; if anyone can fire up a Mac and do anything, why do I always have to look at web pages where they can’t get a friggin’ apostrophe right?
I know, talk about charsets, and all that. But I see these things all the time and it’s just plain annoying having to mentally filter out these garbage characters when reading a web page. Every time i look deeper into it, they were written on a Mac.
Now, I know lots a of pros use a Mac to design web pages. They don’t have this problem. They know what to do to prevent it. But, if a Mac is soooooooo….. easy to use, shouldn’t a basic thing like using the right character set be automatic?
No, it just enables clueless people who shouldn’t be making anything near a web page on either a PC or Mac to screw things up for all of us. Thanks, Apple.
[Of course, the Mac users would say they are right and the 95% who see the screwy text are wrong…. sigh.]
I’ve noticed that vaguely Greek or Russian looking text on several sites myself. Now I know who to blame. By the way, have you seen the new Mac vs. PC Christmas commercial?
Unfortunately, it is probably not the Mac or the writer that is the problem but their word processor. Microsoft Word is notorious for changing normal apostrophes and quotes into “smart quotes” behind your back. Since these characters are outside of the 7-bit character set, they end up as unicode (UTF-8 encoded) multi-byte characters which, in the absense of the proper MIME header in the web page, will be rendered as garbage.
Macs still suck but for other reasons.