A friend of mine has a Google Map with commented place marker pins.

The comments render fine in Firefox but in IE (both 6 and 7) any apostrophe's are escaped with HTML special characters (ampersands and semicolons).

Has anyone else encountered this problem?
I imagine there is no work around other than advise users to switch to Firefox or tell my friend not to use apostrophe's

I had this problem on my home computer, but it only lasted a short while. I believe it may have been a missed update from good or something. But I had many errors with IE. Now I just use Firefox with the Internet Explorer Add-on.

Sorry I can't offer much help! If you fix the problem, let me know what worked for you in case it happens to me again.

The problem has appeared on 3 different machines running IE that I`ve checked. We all know IE6 is a piece of junk but I was surprised that IE7 also has the bug.

What character set are you definining in your HTML documents ? We use GoogleMaps with IE6 and we do not have this problem.

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en....

Well the first part of the URL is this so I guess its in UTF8.
Its automatically Google generated code of course.

Don't use IE anyway. Life would be so much easier if people accepted Opera or Firefox as the best browser and started using it.

Having been bitten by this problem, I've done some digging in the standards.

(Pause to quote Andrew Tannenbaum - "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from". )

It seems that IE is quite justified in not rendering ' as an apostrophe - it's an XML thing, and not present in HTML. There is a perfectly good character ' : if you want to be a bit flash you can use &#39, or even ’ but Google should not be using '

LadynRed, do you think there's a character set that gets round this? I was using charset=ISO-8859-1, which is the same as the Carolina Corvettes site.

A.

I don't really know, I've never run into the OP's problem and we use Google Maps' API on a couple of our sites. You could try UTF-8 and see if that makes any difference.

Am I going mad? Was there a post from Shiraz here just now?

Anyhow, yes - I'll try UTF-8 when I can get my hands on a Windows PC.

Just forget about IE... It's not worth the trouble anyway

OK, some light.

If the Google placemark editor is in HTML mode, it saves apostrophes as ASCII (dec) 39. Everyone, including IE, FF (and I suspect Lynx) understands that.
If the editor is in text mode, it saves apostrophes as ' , whence the IE problem.

I wonder what standard that adheres to.

Sadly I can't ignore IE. Regardless of the relative merits of IE and FF, most of my visitors use IE: I must therefore make sure the site looks right for them.

Accessibility of my site is my problem, not theirs.