Re: charset=us-ascii mandatory?

On May 7, 2007, at 14:21 , Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> Only for XML-based documents. For classic HTML, there is  
> controversy (conflict of specifications). The HTML 4.01  
> specification says that no default shall be assumed (which is a  
> somewhat odd position, but not very odd if you think about it).

Right, and in such a case the validator will properly complain about  
the absence of character encoding declaration, but try anyway with a  
fallback (utf-8), which is infinitely more useful for the user than a  
fatal error.

> I think that for nominally SGML-based validation, a warning should  
> be issued if the encoding not specified either in HTTP headers or  
> in a meta tag

... which has been the case for years.

> and validation should be carried out assuming the windows-1252  
> encoding, since this covers the most common cases.

I'm curious, why windows-1252? How would this platform-dependent  
charset be more appropriate as a fallback than the universal unicode?

thanks
-- 
olivier