IE6 breaks app with non-ascii characters in message bundle

[Thyako]

Using IE6 in Windows XP:

1) Open Truth Box with orkut set to English (US):
http://www.orkut.com/Main#AppInfo.aspx?appId=751275171894

2) Change orkut to Portuguese (Brazil) and the app will have wrong
encoding and won't load. Actually I don't know what is wrong with the
load.

Users have said this occurred since October 16th.

~Thiago.

[Thyako]

Also there were not changes to xml spec/message bundles neither server
backend in the last days.

[Jason]

Hi Thiago. Thanks for the report. I was able to reproduce the issue --
there definitely appears to be a bug with the rendering of UTF-8-
encoded characters in IE 6, and we'll look into this right away.

This bug doesn't appear to be the direct cause of why your application
ceases loading. I substituted your JavaScript with a basic onload
handler which alerts a simple string and this seemed to work. Then I
added your original functions one-by-one until the alert failed to
display. The culprit was parseMsgs, and more specifically, using
__MSG_key__ instead of the actual message value. This may be related
to the bug above since it seems to work just fine with the display
language set to English, only failing when the display language is
changed to Portuguese.

I was not able to test this, but you should try substituting
__MSG_key__ with the actual message value by calling the gadgets.Prefs
method getMsg and passing in the key. This is the preferred way of
using message bundles from JavaScript; the other technique is
acceptable for static text like the app's title and description. Give
this a try and let me know if it works. I'll report the encoding issue
now.

- Jason

[Thyako]

I've changed all __MSG_key__ to prefs.getMsg in the entire xml
(javascript part of course) and nothing changed in IE6, though it
loaded normal in Firefox (without syntax errors etc.)

I removed all accents from Portuguese version to stop losing users,
and it is loading in IE6 again.

~Thiago

[Jason]

Hi Thiago. We just rolled out a fix for this in production. I just did
a quick test and all of the strings that were being mangled before are
now rendered correctly.

- Jason

[Thyako]

It works fine for me, too. Happy coding!

~Thiago