Character encoding of linked HTML pages

From: Herwig Feichtinger <hf@isdn-capi.de> Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2008 11:43:57 +0100 (CET) Message-ID: <34098183531450@shamrock> To: public-mobileok-checker@w3.org · This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0+W3C-0.50 : Friday, 18 January 2008 10:45:56 GMT

Hi all,
when the Mobile Checker scans an XHTML page which
contains a link to an HTML page which is not intended
for mobile usage but serves the desktop version of
the content, the following warning may be displayed:

"Links to resources of which the declared character
encoding is not UTF-8: The linked resource [...] is
served without a declared encoding."

It seems that the checker only looks for an encoding
in the HTTP header but not in the head area of
the HTML page, though such a declaration in the
file would be completely legal.

The W3C page about the declaration of character encodings
http://www.w3.org/International/O-charset says this:

'For HTML or XHTML served as HTML, you should always
use the <meta> tag inside <head>. Example:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" >'

So it might be an idea to suppress the warning in the
checker if a proper http-equiv declaration is found
in the page head.

Cheers
Herwig