Today, I received an e-mail from Amazon:
From: "Amazon.co.uk" <auto-shipping@amazon.co.uk>
Subject: Your Amazon.co.uk order has dispatched
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ASCII
MIME-Version: 1.0
Greetings from Amazon.co.uk,
We thought you would like to know that the following item has been sent
to:
<<< cut out some uninteresting parts >>>
Ordered Title Price Dispatched Subtotal
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Amazon.co.uk items (Sold by Amazon.com Int'l Sales, Inc.):
1 Salsa [Box set] £8.09 1 £8.09My Mozilla mail program was showing the pound sign as follows:
Now why does it show the pound sign as a funny question mark? It's because the e-mail header says it should do so (emphasis mine):
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ASCII
That's right, ASCII. Which is a seven-bit character encoding, which does not include the pound sign. Solution? Go to menu View -> Character Encoding -> Western (Windows-1252) (or ISO 8859-1). And the pound sign is shown.
Another fine example of a programmer who didn't understand what a character encoding was and basically just tried to ignore the whole issue and stick with ASCII. It's even spelled the wrong way (the standard prefers US-ASCII).
Q&A probably didn't caught this because they test on a Windows machine with Outlook or Outlook Express, completely forgetting about Apple's, Linux boxes, and Windows machines which don't have the character set by default set to Windows-1252 but to some other language like Russian.
This whole post sounds a bit pedantic however I find it strange that in the 21st century, someone can afford to stick his head in the sand and pretend that the whole world still uses ASCII.