Sorry if this topic has been addressed, but I can’t seem to get Google or the search engine here to properly search for “”". This seems like it should be something simple, but to my everlasting shame I can’t figure it out.
If I recall correctly, there are lots of HTML (and presumably XML) codes for symbols like the quotation mark, the ampersand, etc. And you can put them in your document using these codes. So how come my browsers don’t always convert " into a quote? Do I have some setting wrong, or is this a problem with those sites? I’m using Opera 9.20, but the same thing happens on Internet Explorer and Firefox, so I don’t think it’s the browser’s fault (though of course I could be missing something).
The particular instance that has irritated me enough to ask this question, thus opening myself up to the extremely high likelihood of looking like a moron, is that I’m trying to read the forums for the illustrious webcomic The Order of the Stick. Their forums use the same software the SDMB uses, vBulletin. But for some reason, lots of their quote marks show up as " instead of quote marks. Take a look here:
The second post shows up like this for me:
Well, I always figured Vaarsuvius was pronounced like Vesuvius, jsut
with an "ar" in place of the initial "e". And Xykon I
always thought was "Zie (rhymes with die or fly)- Kon (rhymes with
pawn or gone)"
Obviously it’s difficult to read posts that are filled with that kind of thing.
I’ve tried changing the encoding on my browser to UTF-8, or ISO-8859-1, or ASCII, or ANSI, or … etc., and I’ve fiddled with a lot of other settings, but nothing has changed it so far. Could somebody please point out what I need to do, so I can get on with hanging my head in shame at my idiocy? It would be greatly appreciated.