Next message: Lloyd Wood: "Re: charset parameter"
Message-Id: <4.2.0.58.J.20010725165508.0638dd80@sh.w3.mag.keio.ac.jp>
Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2001 16:57:12 +0900
To: Terje Bless <link@pobox.com>, Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net>
From: Martin Duerst <duerst@w3.org>
Cc: www-validator@w3.org
Subject: Re: charset parameter
At 03:53 01/07/25 +0200, Terje Bless wrote:
>On 25.07.01 at 03:05, Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net> wrote:
> >For what or whom? HTML 4 explicitly says user agents must not assume a
> >default value for the charset parameter, as says RFC 3023 for
> >application/xml (and application/xhtml+xml refers to that), so this is
> >rather intentionally, isn't it? Sure, dump applications that don't know
> >nothing about HTML may assume some default encoding (but as for
> >application/xml they SHOULD NOT) but we don't have to deal with that.
>
>The issue is that the transport protocol sez that an absense of an explicit
>charset parameter on the Content-Type means "ISO-8859-1"; HTML or XML rules
>don't apply here. When it comes time to parse the markup, you already have
>a charset; the XML/HTML rules do not govern HTTP.
Sorry, but the HTML 4 spec explicitly says that the HTTP default
doesn't work.
>Now application/xml and application/xhtml+xml may well change this, but for
>text/html we're still stuck with it.
>
>That's the theory...
>
>
>In practice you have to decide between "Assume ISO-8859-1 as that's what
>/people/ tend to assume" or "Assume nothing as people will get it wrong
>some part of the time".
Well, in your part, that's what /people/ tend to assume, but in
this part of the world, assumptions are quite different.
>In any case, we'll fix this in our pages when an oportunity presents
>itself. No reason to set a bad example. :-)
Great!
Regards, Martin.