Bizarre IE rendering on page from International Herald Tribune

Pages look fine in source, but render with erroneous/dropped characters.

[bradpaton]

I'm seeing bizarre typos on the IHT site, not that a typo or two is unheard of, but these were strange enough and consistent enough that I decided to look at the page source and see if my eyes were deceiving me or not. Upon examination the typos appeared to be actually generated by IE, as in they aren't present in the actual page source. Following are a couple of snips from source and rendered page located at (http://www.iht.com/articles/91327.html):

(snip)
Most of the Guantánamo prisoners
(snip)

becomes:
"Most of the Guannamo prisoners"

This is located in a div that translates from the stylesheet to "{position:absolute; width:230px; top:0px; left:0px; margin-right:5px;}" and "{font:10px Arial, san-serif;line-height:16px; color:#444444; display:none;}"

Same with:
(snip)
Observing, correctly, that Iraq’s televised
(snip)

becomes:
"Observing, correctly, that Iras televised"

And:
(snip)
a ‘‘competent tribunal’’ determines
(snip)

becomes:
"acompetent tribuna determines"

The only thing that I can think of would be something related to the character encoding set chosen and the stylesheet code, because there isn't a character set specified, and the same words render correctly elewhere on the page in a different span.

The style for a comparison piece that does work is: "{font:16px Arial, san-serif; line-height:20px; color:#50555A; font-weight:bold;}" and "{color:#FF6600;}"
Can anyone offer any clues, or is this truly an IE bug?

Thanks!

[tedster]

I've got IE6 and I don't see the problems you're describing.

However, I think they're doing some server side browser detection and who knows what else (geographical delivery maybe). I get very different layouts with Opera, depending on the UA I select.

And they're using some non-standard layout techniques in IE, such as <div style="visibility:hidden">.<div> just to get paragraph breaks.

[ShawnR]

Check your settings under the "View/Encoding" menu. Set it to something sensible like Western European, and/or tick the auto select option.

Shawn

[grahamstewart]

Could also be their bad tho.
I see they have specified san-serif instead of sans-serif.