The other day my friend Samantha (of "sam I am" fame, for regular readers, my part time music groupie friend) pointed me at an XKCD column.

She thought it might be right up my alley as it looked like it had one of those "cobe page" (that isn't a typo, she called it COBE page) problems.

It was this comic:

Using a ring to bind someone you covet into your dark and twisted world? Wow, just got the subtext there. Also, the apparently eager Beyoncé would've made one badass Nazgȗl.

Hover over it to see the problem, in the tooltip, it should look something like this:

Or maybe I could just show it right here:

Using a ring to bind someone you covet into your dark and twisted world? Wow, just got the subtext there. Also, the apparently eager Beyoncé would've made one badass Nazgȗl.

Bummer.

Let's look at the source of the page:

Aha, my regular readers might know what's going on here....

It may remind people of blogs like Consistent garbage text can be incorrect encoding identification (or detection) and Do not adjust your browser, a.k.a. sometimes two wrongs DO make a right, a.k.a. dumb quotes, and one of these is pretrty much what is going on here, as a matter of a fact.

I mean, the coDe page for that page is indeed marked UTF-8:

Yet if you are using Internet Explorer (I was using 8.0, so was Sam) the browser looked to both of us as if not seeing it that way:

On the other hand, there is Firefox.

My FireFix seems to do it right:

If you want to see the text right and you do not have FireFox and you don't want to right-click and change the encoding in IE, you can:

  1. Open Notepad on a machine with a cp1252 system default codepage;
  2. Paste the text in green above into Notepad;
  3. Save the file;
  4. Close the file;
  5. Open the file.

The text will suddenly look right as these two sequences are proof enough for Notepad to know this is UTF-8, not cp1252:

Using a ring to bind someone you covet into your dark and twisted world? Wow, just got the subtext there. Also, the apparently eager Beyoncé would've made one badass Nazgȗl.

Wow! That is like Behind 'How to break Windows Notepad', but in reverse!

Just like Sauron would have wanted it. :-)