c/o @Shyhoof – “An ode to the journey of ó on a shipping label.“

ODE TO A SHIPPING LABEL

Once there was a little o,

with an accent on top like só.

It started out as UTF8,

(universal since ’98),

but the program only knew latin1,

and changed little ó to “Ä³” for fun.

A second program saw the “Ä³”

and said “I know HTML entity!”

So “Ä³” was smartened to “&ATILDE;&SUP3;”

and passed on through happily.

Another program saw the tangle

(more precisely, ampersands to mangle)

and thus the humble “&TILDE;&SUP3;”

became “&AMP;ATILDE;&AMP;SUP3;”