Re: I think this is the kind of bad site someone was looking for:

> 
> yes, if language support is not provided foreign fonts...such as japanese

The real, exceptional, problem with this page is that they have failed
to specify the character set.  This is a common bug in pages written
for local consumption in countries that don't naturally use ISO 8859/1
as their character set.  In some ways it is a variation on the Symbol
font hack, except that it is using a miscoding of the character set
(which is defaulting to ISO 8859/1) in the primary font for the browser,
and a browser that fails to correctly default the character set or has
been instructed to default it incorrectly.

Current browsers generally allow you to force the character set for the
page, even though this should never be needed for correctly written
pages.

A similar problem occurred with the introduction of MIME and ISO 8859/1
for email, in that people continued to use local 7 bit codes in Europe
without identifying them in the headers.

They also explicitly select a font called "MS Sans Serif" which seems not
to be a full name, so is possibly only meaningful on Thai Windows - if,
as seems likely, that font is a Thai font, or one that is localised for
different versions of Windows, this is a more explicit case of the Symbol
font hack.

If they had specified a character set correctly, some common browsers,
with some options installed, would have tried to update themselves
automatically with appropriate fonts.

The use of the Microsoft font indicates another problem to be that this
is a Microsoft Windows only page.

The other significant problem with the site is that they clearly have
bandwidth problems, at least to England (although that may well be outside
of their primary market, given the assumption that you are running Thai
Windows, and that the ISP has a .th domain name), but have forced the,
quite long, home page to be uncacheable.

Received on Thursday, 8 November 2001 02:23:46 UTC