The Unicode Consortium Discussion Forum (CLOSED)

Hi, what is the proper / best way to enter unicode character on website. I've pasted this "☠" (scull) into my editor (vim while working in terminal via ssh), and it works, and it appeared on my website (Ubuntu Linux, Opera 12.16 browser and Firefox). However I see today that on Windows XP (Maxthon, IE, Chrome) on virtual machine, there is only white square visible.

So it appears it does depend not only on browser, but also on operating system, right?
I know now XP doesn't support Unicode, what about Win7 and Win8 ??
If those do support it does it mean all browsers on those systems will see my scull character on website?

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The limits of my language are the limits of my world.
http://www.pneumatig.eu

If it appears correctly on Linux, then the webpage correctly contains the character, so this almost has to just be a coverage issue for your XP font that the browser uses to display the webpage content. The white box is a very common way for fonts to indicate the presence of a character that it doesn't cover.

Yes, but also the font.

Windows has supported Unicode since Windows NT, and characters outside of the BMP since Windows 2000, AIUI. It actually uses UTF-16 internally. XP itself should have no problem with it, but browser and operating system support aren't the only factors.

All browsers on those systems will support it if the font being used contains the character. If the font doesn't contain the character, then depending on the system it may fall back on another font, or it may may show a generic "character unknown" glyph, such as the empty box. Arial Unicode MS, for example, does contain that symbol (and many other characters from the Miscellaneous Symbols block that it comes from), but Times New Roman does not (it only contains 12 characters from that block, and the Skull And Crossbones isn't one of them: white and black smiley faces, a white sun with rays, the male and female symbols, the black card suits, the eighth note and beamed eighth notes, and the musical sharp sign).

One tool you can use for checking support is FileFormat.info's Unicode tools. It shows what ranges of Unicode characters various fonts support, and how completely. You can also test your browser's support for a block, for example the Miscellaneous Symbols block, where you can then click on a character to see various properties, including a link to a list of fonts (that FileFormat.info knows about) that contain the character.

You write "on virtual machine". What is implied by that qualification? Not a full-fledged installation of Windows?

I'd be happy to let you know what's visible on Win7 using FF or IE if you give a link to the page that has the character.