Unicode, with UTF-8, gave us One True Way to handle that, and it's (wisely) what most of the world uses now, but there's still a lot of text out there in character sets like CP-1252, and a lot of misconfigured web servers blithely hand out that text without declaring the character set properly.Īnother common mistake is UTF-8 encoding text that is already UTF-8 encoded, which makes a real mess out of any text outside of the ASCII range (this produces a pretty recognizable pattern).īut nice try blaming it all on macOS. Pretty much every character set of the past (many decades) agrees on how to interpret bytes 0x20 through 0x7f, in line with what was originally ANSI X3.4 (aka US-ASCII), but the interpretation of bytes over 0x7f varies wildly between character sets. Text is just a stream of bytes - 8-bit numbers - that must be interpreted through a specified character set. And, actually, from what little I've seen, there are quite a few web developers out there using Macs. This is a problem with webserver admins who don't know how to follow modern standards, not a problem with Macs. It's just HTML coding, a bunch of videos, and web pages from around the world in fact, I doubt many web pages are even created and updated on any of Apple's computers - it's a Windows/Linux world, judging from the number of foreign language characters that show up on Mac-rendered web pages, all those Â (and other geographcal-specific letterforms) that riddle (literally and figuratively) a typical printed web page from Mac Os.Īnyone still running iWeb -you know, 'web design for the rest of us!' /sįunny characters showing up on web pages almost invariably happens because web servers are serving text that is encoded in one character set, but claiming it's encoded in another character set, like text in the archaic Windows CP-1252 character set, but claimed to be modern Unicode UTF-8, or vice versa. (They do have minimal OS requirements, though).īut what web browser (other than Apple's Safari) requires that your computer have the latest OS releases installed first? To a degree, Firefox doesn't require this, not does Google Chrome doesn't require this. Suddenly any software updates or security fixes require (currently) 10.15 and maybe 10.14.

Anything older than that - say, 10.11 (El Capitan), 10.13 (High Sierra) et al - are not updated. I never understood the way Apple insists the only way to get the latest (safest) version of Safari is through the last 2 OS releases.

Update from el capitan to high sierra