Sounds like a job for Tidy (was: Bug#62700: marked as done (charset should be specified before TITLE) (fwd))

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This message recently showed up in the Debian Bug Tracking System.  I've 
editted it to cut down on headers and automatically generated text.

The problem is a bit nit-picky, but it brings up the question: is it
Tidy's job to fix standard <META> information as well as HTML/DHTML/XML?

Erik Rossen                         ^
rossen@freesurf.ch                 /e\
http://www.multimania.com/rossen   ---   GPG key ID: 2935D0B9

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Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2000 16:19:10 -0500 (CDT)
From: Klaus Weide <kweide@enteract.com>
To: submit@bugs.debian.org
Subject: charset should be specified before TITLE

Package: www.debian.org
Version: current

The order of tags found in translated (as well as English) pages is
(This one is from <URL:http://www.debian.org/index.ru.html> - KOI8-R
encoding transliterated here for this mail):

   <HEAD>
   <TITLE>Debian GNU/Linux -- Universal'naya Operacionnaya Sistema</TITLE>
   <LINK REV="made" HREF="mailto:webmaster@debian.org">
   <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=koi8-r">
   .....

The META tag specifying the charset should appear *before* any text that
needs this information in order to be correctly decoded - here: the
TITLE element's content.

This would help browsers that do a one-pass through the document and
don't apply the charset info retroactively - specifically, lynx.
I haven't checked what other browsers do, but expect them to also be
helped by a different order.  It's more logical, after all.

Much better yet would be: put the charset info *where it belongs*,
in the HTTP header, instead of relying on HTTP-EQUIV.

   Klaus

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Received on Thursday, 3 August 2000 11:43:30 UTC