- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2006 20:44:33 +0000 (UTC)
- To: Philip TAYLOR <P.Taylor@Rhul.Ac.Uk>
- Cc: W3C HTML Mailing List <www-html@w3.org>
On Fri, 2 Jun 2006, Philip TAYLOR wrote: > > Much as I think your argument has merit, I cannot see how you can > resolve the following paradox : suppose, in some as-yet unknown encoding > (say, ISO-9999-9), the character positions which in ISO-8859-1 > correspond to the letters "M", "E", "T" and "A" correspond instead to > the letters "B", "O", "D" and "Y". Now the server says that the document > is in ISO-8859-1, so when the UA sees > > <META http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; > charset=iso-9999-9"> > > it interprets the META directive as you would wish. But in so doing, it > starts to parse the document on the basis of it being expressed in > ISO-9999-9, whereupon it discovers that there wasn't a META directive at > all, there was, rather, a(n ill-formed) BODY tag. But because it now > knows there /was/ no META directive, it parses using ISO-8859-1. But > that means there IS a META directive. And so on. I'm sure you see the > problem ... I've actually seen this, with a UTF-8 document that said: <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-16"> -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Friday, 2 June 2006 23:16:50 UTC