Character Test

How does your browser see codes 128-159, used in "windows-1252" in lieu of Unicode?

Under the column "Bad char" are character references in the form &#nnn;, where nnn is the number in the "Bad number" column. If you see "Windows" characters in that column, your browser is actually buggy, since this document is declared as having a charset of UTF-8, where those codes are illegal (as per Unicode).

What this means (in English) is that, for example, if you are accustomed to typing ALT+0151 in Windows to get an em-dash in HTML, somebody looking at the same document on another platform will likely see something goofy in its place.  Moral: use something like "--" if you need content to be legible to legacy browsers, or use the Unicode character reference — (or —). Check out Jukka Korpela's On the use of some MS Windows characters in HTML for an excellent description of this matter...

Note the "Good Char" column uses decimal character references (Netscape 4.x chokes on Hexadecimal character references); the last column uses corresponding Entity names (which Netscape likewise cannot digest and just throws the literal &EntityName; back at you).