*̡͌l̡*̡̡ ̴̡ı̴̴̡ ̡̡͡|̲̲̲͡͡͡ ̲▫̲͡ ̲̲̲͡͡π̲̲͡͡ ̲̲͡▫̲̲͡͡ ̲|̡̡̡ ̡ ̴̡ı̴̡̡ *̡͌l̡*

If that's not the coolest thing you've ever seen...well, I dunno what you could have seen.

Yeah... well... unfortunately, not all of us have the font to get that rendered correctly. (I'm assuming that I'm not supposed to be seeing question marks).

Sorry Lappy512, but that is the worst thing I have ever seen. It looks like a pile of junk, accurately depicting your front yard and most likely your house.

a simple google search shows instances of that dating back before feb of this year at the latest.

It looks better on WLM. Methinks browser = bad character parsing

Really? On WLM, all I see is a string of boxes, with the occasional asterick or pipe intersparsed.

lappy
is not
the
maker
of this

I'm not sure that this qualifies as ASCII art.
I'm pretty sure that it doesn't, though.


Exhibit 1: This was found in the page source. (Emphasis added)

Exhibit 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iso-8859-1
The encoding used is clearly 8-bit.

Exhibit 3:
The appearance of the text when displayed on Firefox 1.5 on my computer.

Exhibit 4:
The appearance of the string when displayed in IE6 on my computer.

Exhibit 5:
The intended appearance of the text.

Exhibit 6: Djbob blaming the browser.

We can infer from Exhibits 3 and 4 having about twice as many glyphs as Exhibit 5 that the string is in fact in a 16-bit encoding. This is also supported by the observation that Exhibits 3 and 4 display spaces in-between the commas while Exhibit 5 does not. Exhibit 1 shows us that the page is specified as an ISO-8859-1-encoded file. Wikipediaing that, we get Exhibit 2, showing us that ISO-8859-1 is an 8-bit format. Now, since the string is intended to be in a 16-bit encoding, most likely UTF-16, and the page's specified encoding is an 8-bit character set, ISO-8859-1, the correct behavior for the browser would be to assume that the string was encoded in ISO-8859-1 even though it is actually a UTF-16 string. Simply put, the correct behavior would be to display it incorrectly, as paradoxical as that is. We can see from Exhibit 6 that djbob assumes that the browser's behavior is incorrect. Therefore, we can conclude that djbob is wrong.


... I overdid it again.

Ascii art must take a lot of time.

I disagree, as you make an incorrect corollary statement in regards to Exhibit 6. Your understanding of my statement seems to be that I assume the browser's behavior is incorrect is regards to character encoding standards. However, you misinterpretted my meaning. I said, "Methinks browser = bad character parsing". Your mistake lies in your interpretation of the meaning of the word "bad," as used in my statement. You assumed I meant "incorrect." However, the real meaning of the word "bad" in my statement was "not good," where "good" means "as it is intended to be." An example of a similiar usage would be in the common slang phrase, "It's all good," which is, in effect, equivalent to saying "It is all as it is intended to be." Therefore, my use of "bad" in my phrase was a correct usage, and was misinterpretted by you with a different meaning.

Ah, fiddlesticks, you got me.

you should find something not-geeky to argue about.

You could stop worrying so much about public perception.

Should we be concerned that we're seeing squares and vertical lines?