- From: Martin J. Dürst <mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch>
- Date: Fri, 22 Aug 1997 17:20:53 +0200 (MET DST)
- To: Mary Holstege <holstege@firstfloor.COM>
- cc: Benjamin Franz <snowhare@netimages.com>, www-html@w3.org
On Fri, 22 Aug 1997, Mary Holstege wrote: > > Benjamin Franz writes: > > On Fri, 22 Aug 1997, E. Stephen Mack wrote: > > > <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" value="text/html; charset='UTF-8'"> > > ^^^^^^^ > > This is the second time I have seen someone assert (either explicitly or > > implicitly) that the charset should be contained in quotes. I looked > > through the HTTP1.1 spec and could not find anything suggesting that this > > was either necessary or even acceptable, and it appears to conflict with > > actual usage for most documents I have seen. Where is this coming from? > Pages 24 and 25 of the spec: > > HTTP uses Internet Media Types in the Content-Type (section 14.18) > and Accept (section 14.1) header fields in order to provide open and > extensible data typing and type negotiation. > > media-type = type "/" subtype *( ";" parameter ) > type = token > subtype = token > > Parameters may follow the type/subtype in the form of attribute/value > pairs. > > parameter = attribute "=" value > attribute = token > value = token | quoted-string > > Looks to me like you should be able to quote it or not, as you please, because > in this case the parameter value (UTF-8) is a valid token. > > However, quoted string is defined to use the double quote (top of page 16). > SGML and HTML allow you to use either paired double or single quotes. Yes indeed. But in that case, it should be <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" value='text/html; charset="UTF-8"'> It may also be that either HTTP or MIME has some restrictions on what goes for a "charset" parameter (e.g just a token and not a quoted-string). But probably the main problems is whether browsers grok the above string. Regards, Martin.
Received on Friday, 22 August 1997 11:21:15 UTC