Forum Moderators: travelin cat
In a previous thread (http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum49/175.htm), JISISV posted a similar issue, but I didn't see any helpful responses so I'm going to re-pose the question.
We too have a situation where Unicode characters are causing problems with dropdowns in IE 5.2 on the Mac. We're getting a LOT of support calls on this and I need to find a solution if possible. Let me see if I can explain the issue fully.
Our site has dropdowns which start with - followed by some mundane text. Our server encodes the text as UTF-8. In addition, the width of the dropdown is fixed, and a fixed margin on the left (where its floated label resides). In this situation, the dropdown appears empty when you click the button. But if you select something, or just scroll down, you will see the selection.
In an effort to track down this problem, I saved the HTML to disk and edited it in some basic text editor. I added only a base element so I didn't have to download everything. To my surprise, when I viewed the local file, the problem was gone. After much head scratching (and banging) I, for reasons unknown, check the character encoding on both. Lo and behold, the server was sending UTF-8 but the local file was saved as Western (Latin-1).
I should also note that the problem did not occur earlier when we did not have the non-breaking spaces (or our QA guys would have caught it).
Has anyone else seen this problem and know of a way to fix it short of not using non-breaking spaces? I would use optgroups (which acheive the effect better) but they don't render in WinIE5.x and the lost information in the group title is important.
Thanks,
Adsmart
<select name="fromAcct">
<option value="null">Select an Account</option>
<option value="0">-    INVESTMENT SAVINGS </option>
<option value="1">-    CHEQUING SAVINGS</option>
<option value="3">-    RRSP</option>
<option value="4">-    RRIF</option>
</select>
