Re: The Return of "WaSP Asks the W3C"

"steph" <sniffles@unadorned.org>
> This month, the WaSP asks the W3C: Which MIME type should XHTML be
> served with?
>
> The answer? You'll have to peek at:
> http://www.webstandards.org/learn/askw3c/sep2003.html

It says

"In serving your XHTML document as text/xml you may run into issues with
character sets because the reuls which apply to text/* MIME types are more
complex than those for application/*."

Yet fails to note that exactly the same issue applies to text/html other
than citing Appendix C.

Appendix C says:

"If this is not possible, a document that wants to set its character
encoding explicitly must include both the XML declaration an encoding
declaration and a meta http-equiv statement (e.g., <meta
http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=EUC-JP" />)"

Which seems to allow for the document to override the charset from the HTTP
level (which if not specified explicity _is_ iso-8859-1 AIUI, if we are not
allowed to do this with text/xml which is what the answer is presumably
saying with the "much caution on the charset issue".  Why are we allowed to
do it with text/html which has identical defaults?

Jim.

Received on Thursday, 4 September 2003 11:25:20 UTC