What is the font of the Washington Post?

I font to be readable

• Why do my Firefox and IE browsers, as well as iTunes, occasionally scramble a word or word part in normal text and instead display foreign characters? Why do Firefox and IE browsers occasionally scramble a word or word part in normal text and instead display foreign characters, such as an A with a carat over it, or the Euro symbol, or the text string and% on some web pages? Also, when the Washington Post imports articles from other sites into their website, odd symbols appear in the article text, eg.: "Public health officials have said so-called ?social distancing? strategies ¿ sharply..." Finally, in iTunes podcast episode descriptions I frequently see the text string &md*ash (please mentally remove the asterisk, which I added in the middle of the string to force it to appear on this web page as it does in iTunes. Another example in iTunes: the word encyclopedie (with an acute accent diacritical mark placed over the middle e) is written as encyclo?pedie. What will fix this? Do I need to install another font? Thanks for your help.

• Answer:

  The A with a caret over it is a classic sign of character encoding mismatch: the page contains UTF-8 but the web server serves it with a ISO-8859-1 Content-Type header. A similar thing happens with smart quotes and the 1252 codepage. It means the person running the web site doesn't know what they're doing. Browsers tend to have a lot of heuristics built-in to try to guess the proper encoding of a page rather than trusting the incorrect hints given by the meta tags or http headers, but it doesn't always work.