dstiles - 8:40 pm on Jul 20, 2012 (gmt 0)

Lucy - I have now written out the before/after strings to a text file. This shows the & pound entity in the first (in-function) string but the 8859-1 pound symbol (A3? Probably, memory fails me!) in the post-function string.

Thinking around this, I see no reason at all for this as it's all pre-browser-rendering. The implication of my tests suggest this has been happening for some time and a further test with Opera (which renders the proper sign in all cases) indicates the code I generate is identical for both browsers (as one would expect).

I think there are two separate issues here:

1. The original coding is being corrupted ONLY by FF14. It is rendering the 8859-1 pound sign as "character unrecognised" which it never did before and that Opera renders correctly. FF needs to fix this - there are a lot of sites around that do not use the & pound entity.

2. I have a problem with ASP that has been present (probably) since the site was new, several years ago. Previously the problem was masked by browsers rendering the pound sign correctly even though it was not presented as an entity. Why this should be corrupted between returning it from the function (where it is correct) and receiving it in the calling function (where it has been translated back from entity to pound sign) I do not know - and without the FF14 rendering problem I would not have discovered it now. Whatever, there is a corruption in the ASP function call - something I've seen before but not in this way.


sundaridevi - I was actually thinking of sites that redirect an incomer to a more useful page depending on the referer. If they cannot do that then they lose revenue.

As to market research: it's always useful to know how people found your site and why. G is holding back on this info unless you have a specific account with them (I forget the details). Pretty soon it will be a paid-for service. With the advent of G wildlife that's killing off websites I can see a day not too far away when people will prevent G from accessing their sites altogether. I'm abount to do that now on at least one of my sites that G attacked today (I use "attacked" in its correct sense).

As to "security" - that is rubbish. People arrive at a site and expect that site to give them useful information (whatever). If their query isn't available to the web site that is not always possible. G's other so-called "security" has been more help to criminals than to individuals. Details of a proper gmail communication, for example, will be known to all legally interested parties. Spam and other criminal mail sent via G cannot be traced by IP (and hence blocked) because G has never provided the original sender's IPs. "Security", they say. In this case the criminal's security.