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Bonjour!
Over the last week or so we’ve been tidying up our website for people learning French, OnlineFrenchClub.com, specifically the ten Grammar exercises, the idea being to remove some old advertising code, delete the contents of the page footer – which contained an invalid email address – and so on. Very belated spring-cleaning.
We downloaded the web pages, made the corrections, uploaded everything to the server again, and thought no more about it. Until…
Someone emailed to say the accented characters were all missing.
Oops! How did that happen?
Turns out that our pages were written in ANSI, which is a ‘character set’, the purpose of which being that web browsers and other applications know to display, for instance, an accented ‘e’ rather than a normal ‘e’.
French has, what, three or four different ‘e’s? So that’s important.
But the world moved on, leaving ANSI and us behind. The new default ‘character set’ is called UTF-8, apparently, which shouldn’t be a problem necessarily, except that the software I used to modify our webpages assumed they were written in UTF-8, even if they weren’t, so when I came to save my changes, BOOM, DISASTER, all the accented characters disappeared.
To cut a long story short, I spent the weekend fixing everything. The French Grammar exercises now hopefully have the necessary accented characters, though as I had to repair all hundred and twenty test items (ten exercises, twelve questions in each, sometimes multiple different accented ‘e’s in each word) MANUALLY, it’s quite possible I’ve missed something. Or mixed up the ‘è’s and theh ‘é’s, which is easy to do.
Anyway, apologies for the mess up. Do take a look at the Grammar exercises, and do please let us know if you spot anything that still needs fixing. Merci.
À la semaine prochaine !
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