In the big scheme of things this is just not that big of a deal. But I've never let that stop me from whining about something in the long-term blog before.
The whole "apostrophe-turns-into-question-mark" issue used to be quite common across the Internet. Blogs were particularly susceptible to the problem, which I know springs from a coding issue between various word processors and publishing programs (and why you must "scrub" any Word document with Notepad before you post it). I don't claim to know the exact, technical issue, and trust me when I tell you I have no interest in understanding it.
But I'm less patient with the problem as time passes. Seems to me the brainiacs who program these computers should be able to figure out that when a character appears between two other characters, with no spaces on either side, said central chracter (regardless of what the coding says) probably shouldn't be a question mark.
When I see this in our long-term 2010 Volvo XC60's display it makes me think of low-buck blog pages from 1999.
Karl Brauer, Edmunds.com Editor at Large
fushigi says:
11:55 AM, 12/ 7/10
Someone - Apple, Volvo, or both in this case - isn't using the Unicode character set for storing alphanumeric data. To see what I'm talking about, in your browser do View - Character Encoding (Firefox) or Page - Encoding (Internet Explorer).
Historically, each language used a unique character set to represent their letters, numbers, and symbols. When computers came along, these character sets were mapped into the 256 possible values of a byte. For instance, American English character #65 is an uppercase "A" (hold down the Alt key and type 065 on the number pad). #97 is a lowercase "a". But in Russia #65 might be something else.
Karl, in short ' in one character set has the same numeric value as ? in another.
Unicode is an attempt to unite the computer representations of various languages. The character set size is multiple bytes long so many thousands of characters are possible. Most modern systems use Unicode for storage to eliminate the problem, but there are stragglers.
waffle2000 says:
11:57 AM, 12/ 7/10
It's probably because these displays support ASCII (a relatively simple character set) and not Unicode. Ascii has one apostrophe: '. Unicode also has the 'smart' apostrophes: ‘ and ’. When a character isn't supported by a font or a system, the default fallback is "?".
But yeah, it sucks. If they weren't planning to support unicode, they could have at least filtered the smart quotes into dumb ones.
ptcdawg says:
12:09 PM, 12/ 7/10
How do you stand to ride in a car at 80 degrees? 72-74 is as high as I can go in most rides.
fushigi says:
02:07 PM, 12/ 7/10
This being a European car, just imagine if that was 80 Celsius. :)
carlisimo says:
05:45 PM, 12/ 7/10
Half my music has accent marks (Spanish), Japanese kana, or Chinese characters in the filenames. The inability to read them would actually be a significant point against a potential purchase.
justinlink says:
09:26 AM, 12/ 8/10
@carlisimo
you're in luck! as of november (last month), Volvo starting phasing out the silly screen above the dash (the screen shot shown above) and will be installing the integrated system from the S60 (nav, climate, radio all rolled into one. they were behind the times on that one). that should take care of the unicode issue.
rick8365 says:
10:55 AM, 12/ 8/10
80 deg?
myob says:
02:22 AM, 12/30/10
How do you get your phone to show up with your name? Mine just says the model of my phone and unfortunately my wife has the same phone so I can never tell which phone is active with the bluetooth.
Not that it matters too much. I find chatting while driving makes men seem like bored chatty housewives. Real men argue about sports and cars in a sports bar on on blogs. : )