Next message: Martin Duerst: "Re: charset parameter"
Message-Id: <4.2.0.58.J.20010727114411.05b24a10@sh.w3.mag.keio.ac.jp>
Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 11:49:52 +0900
To: Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net>, Terje Bless <link@pobox.com>
From: Martin Duerst <duerst@w3.org>
Cc: W3C Validator <www-validator@w3.org>
Subject: Re: charset parameter
At 00:05 01/07/27 +0200, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
>* Terje Bless wrote:
> >The HTML Recommendation has no authority to dictate syntax or semantics for
> >an arbitrary transport protocol.
>
>Well, it doesn't. It defines behaivour for applications that retrieve
>specific content over a specific transport protocol.
>
> >I'm guessing that the _intent_ was that something labelled "ISO-8859-1"
> >should be parsed accordingly, until a meta element with, say,
> >"windows-1250" was encountered, and then _restarted_ with the new encoding
> >in effect (implicit in this is that it should be compatible with the
> >transport encoding up to the meta element).
>
>No, the intent was, that _servers_ parse the HTML document and send the
>correct Content-Type: header, HTML 4 even says so.
Where? Is that a must? It was planned that way, but it turned out
that it was too complicated to do that on the server, and too
much performance hit.
> >This obviously does not consider HTTP defaulting behaviour, but even
> >[RFC 2854] still says that ISO-8859-1 is the default.
>
>It says what HTTP/1.1 says, it doesn't define any default value for the
>charset parameter but it does point at section 5.2 of HTML 4.
Yes. Section 5.2 of HTML 4 is closest to current practice, and
that's what the validator is following (or trying to follow).
>[1] I think the http-equiv attribute is the worst thing ever
> incorporated into HTML. It hasn't been implemented, it beeing
> abused, semantics aren't clearly defined, the definition is
> ambigious, only a small number of people put syntactically valid
> information in the content attribute for some HTTP headers, etc.pp.
> I'll find some evil hellcat to put even more evil spells on the HTML
> WG members if this attribute won't be kicked out of XHTML 2.0 (or
> replaced by something with value) };-)
This is easy to guess. XHTML 2.0 will use the XML 'encoding' pseudo-attribute.
Regards, Martin.