[mobileOK] i18n comment: encoding="ISO639"

Comment from the i18n review of:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-mobileOK-basic10-tests-20070130/

Comment 3
At http://www.w3.org/International/reviews/0703-mobileok/
Editorial/substantive: S
Owner: RI

Location in reviewed document:
3.3 CHARACTER_ENCODING_SUPPORT and CHARACTER_ENCODING_USE

Comment: 
[[If character encoding is specified in more than one way, and not all values are the same, FAIL]]


I'm not personally familiar with transcoding scenarios, but I've heard people often quoting them as justification for using the HTTP header to declare encodings and for the HTTP declaration to have higher precedence in HTML than the in-document declarations. As I understand it, the rationale is that a transcoding server can change the encoding of the document as it passes through, but doesn't change in the internal encoding declaration. Since HTTP declarations beat in-document declarations, this is supposed to be OK. I've also heard that this kind of thing happens particularly when serving documents to mobile devices. If this is true, then I guess there must be occasions when it is permissible for the HTTP header declaration to be different from the other two? 

Received on Wednesday, 21 March 2007 15:41:11 UTC