Expressen

Out there in the big bad world there's something called ASCII.

Get It Try It

Out there in the big bad world there's something called ASCII. There's also something called UTF-8. There's also something called 'charset' found in HTML headers. These people don't know it.

Swedish has three characters not found in ASCII: å, ä, and ö. Most Swedes don't realise this or at least don't think about it all that much. But Swedish webmeisters should.

The reason they don't see things like this is almost to the very last one of them they're still drinking the Microsoft Kool-Aid. Their default character set is Western ISO Latin 1. And on Western ISO Latin 1 - and with Microsoft Windows - things appear absolutely peachy.

But this is the 'web' now. The web isn't a Microsoft product. And it doesn't follow the weird rules of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. And there are people out there - yes even in Sweden - who don't drink the Microsoft Kool-Aid, who visit sites like this tabloid's (the biggest in the country) and who rub their eyes in disbelief.

The year is 2008. The web is officially grown up. And these people - these webmeisters - still have no clue?