Freigeben über

IE9 Compatibility: Proper Use of the Charset Token

  • Artikel

Recently, during site-compatibility testing of IE9, we encountered a cool online game that does not load properly in Internet Explorer. Using the F12 Developer Tools’ Script debugger, the page immediately hits a script error (“c00ce56e”) while loading:

F12 Showing Script error

A quick search on this error code turns up a Microsoft KB article  explaining that this error code is shown when the server specifies an unsupported character encoding for the response. The KB article points out that “ISO8859_1” is not a proper alias for a supported character encoding named “ISO-8859-1”.

Looking at the game’s traffic in Fiddler, the problem is immediately apparent:

image

The character encoding in use is named utf-8,and utf8 (without the dash) is not a supported alias for this character encoding. Hence, when this page attempts to load its JSON content, a script error is encountered because the character encoding is not recognized.

I quickly whipped up a tiny bit of FiddlerScript to verify my theory:

static function OnPeekAtResponseHeaders(oSession: Session) {

// Fix up malformed Character Set
if (oSession.oResponse.headers.ExistsAndContains("Content-Type", "utf8"))
{
oSession.oResponse.headers["Content-Type"] =
oSession.oResponse.headers["Content-Type"].Replace("utf8", "utf-8");
oSession["ui-backcolor"] = "green";

}

This script will replace any instances of utf8 with the proper utf-8. I cleared my browser cache and reloaded the game, and it now works properly!

Specification of the a HTTP response’s encoding using the Content-Type HTTP header is a best practice for both performance and security reasons. Generally speaking, UTF-8 is a great choice. However, it’s important to specify the correct encoding value, using the correct encoding name. Attempting to accommodate improperly specified encodings can lead to compatibility, interoperability, and security problems.

 

-Eric

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 28, 2011
    Out of curiosity, what do other browsers do? Wouldn't the general principle of "be liberal in what you accept" dictate that clearly unambiguous spellings should be permitted?

  • Anonymous
    February 28, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 03, 2011
    If you're wondering, yes, we did reach out to the site owner, and we've been playing an alpha build where they've fixed this problem. :-)

  • Anonymous
    March 08, 2011
    Obviously you'll need to test the new site for compatibility issues; how much other work are you getting done? :-) (My top score is a disappointing 120...)

  • Anonymous
    March 08, 2011
    :-) I don't think I've gotten a score higher than about 20, but we have a developer on the team who loves this game.