Re: css/special character conflict in ie

Hi again Mike

I  see that using #8212 instead of #151 didn't solve the problem,
so I did a bit of experimenting, and found something most
peculiar.

The only thing I could think of was that the font being used to
display the symbol had some sort of non-standard character
mapping, so I made local copies of your html and stylesheet, and
changed the stylesheet definition for TD from font-family :
sans-serif to font-family : arial.  The symbol now displayed OK.
I tried some of the other sans-serif fonts I've got on my PC and
they all displayed the symbol OK.  I then tried font-family :
helvetica, sans-serif.  I don't have a helvetica font so I'd have
expected that to display exactly the same as specifying
font-family : sans-serif.  Not so - it STILL displayed OK!  It's
only when the font-family definition has just "sans-serif" and
nothing else that the symbol is displayed as a vertical bar
rather than an em dash (on this PC at any rate).

So, it looks like you've stumbled across another of those
peculiar quirks of browser implementation of CSS, and rather a
good one at that!  :-)  It *looks* like one should always name at
least one font in font-family definitions to ensure that text is
displayed correctly.  Maybe it's something like - with just
"sans-serif" the browser uses some sort of system font, but if a
named font is specified as well, even if that font isn't
installed it forces the browser to check installed fonts and it
uses one of those instead.  Or something like that.

Weird!  :-)

Regards,
Donna
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dms(at)zetnet.co.uk
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