- From: Philip Taylor <pjt47@cam.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2009 22:37:28 +0000
- To: Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org>, www-archive@w3.org
Richard Ishida wrote: > HTML5 support is already creeping into browsers, eg. the <meta > charset="..."/> tag seems to be widely supported [1], but I can see a > point here. > > [1] http://www.w3.org/International/tests/results/results-html5-charset It's not a particularly important issue but I'll mention it anyway: <meta charset> was actually supported long before HTML5, e.g. it works in IE 5.0 (and I think it would work in even older browsers if I had any to test in). Some people (about 0.1% of web pages today) write <meta http-equiv=Content-Type content=text/html; charset=iso-8859-1> (failing to put quotes around the 'content' attribute value, resulting in an accidental 'charset' attribute). I would guess the history is that some browser supported that syntax (perhaps because it had a dumb pre-parse scanner that just looked for the bytes "charset="), and the others either independently implemented the bug or else had to copy it for compatibility with sites that worked in the other browser. So HTML5 didn't cause any implementation changes - it just recognised that implementations already supported the charset attribute, and made it into valid syntax since it's backward-compatible and easier to write. (But there are plenty of other areas where HTML5 is already moving (and (subjectively) more vigorously than "creeping") into browsers - see <http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Implementations_in_Web_browsers>.) -- Philip Taylor pjt47@cam.ac.uk
Received on Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:38:08 UTC