HTML: SPECIAL CHARACTERS

Call me a pedant if you so wish, but find it annoying when I see foreign names and words (especially Spanish ones) spelt incorrectly on the internet, especially in news items. This may seem trivial, but there is absolutely no reason why news providers such as the BBC should not be using accents consistently and correctly. I sent a complaint to the BBC several years ago asking them why they did not use accents in foreign names and places, only to be told that they preferred not to due to "problems with the interpretation of accents in different web browsers". A rather lame excuse, I think.

Since then, web design has moved on significantly and such "problems" should no longer exist (in theory, at least). Yet the BBC continues to omit any trace of accents in its coverage of world news. So I decided to write to them again. Below is a copy of the complaint that I sent them:

Please could you tell me why BBC journalists fail to spell foreign names correctly throughout the BBC website. There is a complete disregard for accents in, for example, French, Spanish and Portuguese names, which - in my opinion - is both unprofessional and disrespectful to the languages in question and the people who speak them. On a technical side, there is no need to omit written accents; with the use of the correct HTML code, these accents will appear correctly on all web browsers.

Low and behold, here is the reply that I have received from them:

Thank you for your e-mail.
Our policy is not to use any diacritics anywhere in our stories. This policy was introduced in the early days of the BBC News website to avoid problems with browsers rendering accents or other non-standard elements as garbled characters.
Arguably now accents are widely catered for in all browsers, but we have preferred to err on the side of caution.

This reply is less than convincing. If websites adhere to W3C web standards, there is no reason why accents should not be interpreted correctly in all browsers. Each "special character" has its own value in HTML code which, if entered correctly, will be read correctly regardless of the web browser that is used. It also raises questions as to whether you should continue to pander to the needs of browsers that are now completely out-of-date, but I won't go there.

You can draw your own conclusions from this, but personally speaking the generic response from the BBC just doesn't wash with me. If this were the case, the BBC world service and BBC Learn Spanish sites would be accent-free too.