Next message: Bertilo Wennergren: "Re: Character set question"
Message-ID: <029301c0a768$4fbb82a0$2c093ccc@kathleen>
From: "Kathleen Anderson" <kathleen@spiderwebwoman.com>
To: "Liam Quinn" <liam@htmlhelp.com>, "Thanasis Kinias" <tkinias@asu.edu>
Cc: <www-validator@w3.org>
Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2001 19:40:00 -0500
Subject: Re: Character set question
Thank you all for your prompt replies. I have sent some colleagues from the
microsoft.public.frontpage.client newsgroup to the archives of this list to
read your answers.
The question came up there after the problem with the validator was fixed.
~ Kathleen Anderson
Spider Web Woman Designs
http://www.spiderwebwoman.com
email: kathleen@spiderwebwoman.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Liam Quinn" <liam@htmlhelp.com>
To: "Thanasis Kinias" <tkinias@asu.edu>
Cc: <www-validator@w3.org>
Sent: March 07, 2001 4:26 PM
Subject: RE: Character set question
> On Wed, 7 Mar 2001, Thanasis Kinias wrote:
>
> > If one is only using ASCII characters and the server is sending a
charset
> > value in the header Content-Type field (whether it's sending UTF-8,
Latin-1,
> > or Windows 1252), all is OK vis-Ã -vis the standards - unless I'm really
> > misunderstanding "may" in the recommendation.
>
> No, you're not misunderstanding the recommendation.
>
> > At any rate, there isn't a compelling reason _not_ to specify with a
<meta>.
>
> It's not too severe of a problem, but the "Netscape charset burp" [1] is
> enough reason for me to avoid specifying the charset with a <meta> tag, as
> long as I can specify the charset in the HTTP header.
>
> [1] http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/%7Eflavell/charset/ns-burp.html
>
> > Liam also wrote (in response to Bertilo):
> >
> > > But it will cause links containing "#" to fail in IE4 for Windows. So
> > > ISO-8859-1 is still preferred when you don't need characters outside
> > > ISO-8859-1.
> >
> > That's _bizarre_, but I guess not altogether surprising. That answers
the
> > question I guess. Is that also a problem with XHTML docs with implicit
> > (default) UTF-8 encoding?
>
> I can't say as I haven't tested this.
>
> > On this subject, must one then specify a charset with XHTML docs served
as
> > text/html, even if it is the default UTF-8?
>
> According to the standard, I would say no since XHTML is XML. But if
> you're serving your XHTML as text/html, than I assume you're concerned
> about HTML compatibility, in which case you'd want to specify the charset
> no matter what it is. (Appendix C of the XHTML 1.0 Recommendation
> addresses this, but it's not normative.)
>
> --
> Liam Quinn
>
>