Re: Fallbeck to UTF-8

On 29 nov. 07, at 02:15, Andreas Prilop wrote:
> I still believe that the following behaviour is illogical and
> not really helpful. (It has been discussed before.)
>
>
> Given a webpage that does not specify any encoding (charset).
>
> Then validator.w3.org reports:
>
> (1) No Character Encoding Found! Falling back to UTF-8.
>
> (2) Sorry, I am unable to validate this document because on line ...
>    it contained one or more bytes that I cannot interpret as utf-8
>
> This makes no sense; and it doesn't help the user.

You're not suggesting a better procedure, either. As far as I can  
tell, the alternative (as done by other tools) is to simply throw a  
fatal error whenever no charset is given. Trying to fall back to utf-8  
at least helps in some cases. Better than nothing IMHO.

Maybe what you would like is a different error message? Instead of  
"sorry I am not able to validate because it is not utf-8", in the case  
of a charset fallback, say something like "sorry, I am not able to  
read this document because it does not declare any encoding and an  
attempt to fall back failed. Please do this and that..."

-- 
olivier