feedMojibake on blogs.sun.com
Bloggers on blogs.sun.com currently see broken text in many places when writing in French, Chinese, or Japanese – or even just English with “smart quotes.” Instead of the intended text, they get what Japanese users call “mojibake” (文字化け) – “changed characters” or “ghost characters.” The reason is incorrect use of character encodings in the version of the Roller software and the templates used on blogs.sun.com. In the latest version of Roller most of these problems have been fixed by consistent use of UTF-8 everywhere, a solution that I highly recommend.
If you’re one of the affected authors, you can fix the problem at least
for readers who access blogs.sun.com directly. Log into the site, go
to the Website:Pages section, and add a <meta> tag
declaring the content type immediately after the <head> tags
of your page templates. For templates that begin with a DOCTYPE declaration
for an XHTML type, the correct form of the tag is
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8"/>
For templates with a DOCTYPE declaration for an HTML type
or no DOCTYPE declaration at all, the correct form is
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8">
There seems to be no practical way for authors to fix the problems seen in RSS clients such as planetsun.org. RSS feeds from blogs.sun.com that contain non-ASCII characters are fundamentally broken and are not under the authors’ control. The solution will be to upgrade blogs.sun.com to a newer version of Roller.