snowman=☃
Posted by elpabl0 on 20th August 2010
We’ve got a neat little Ruby on Rails project going in the office - early stages, but coming along nicely. Whilst idly browsing the site I notice this in my address bar:
Do you see the little snowman image there? My first thought was that this was some little developer easter egg, so I ran over to Shapeshed’s desk to let him know I’d found it. Turns out, he was as surprised as me. A little more digging and he discovered this is actually RoR’s way of dealing with a IE bug, where the browser stubbornly refuses to deal with unicode characters. By passing our little frosty friend as a hidden input, IE is forced to look at the ‘accept-charset’ attribute.
A more detailed explanation can be found here, for the technically minded amongst you!
