[Bug 21174] New: Polyglot: allow UTF-8 to be declared with meta@http-equiv="content-type"

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=21174

            Bug ID: 21174
           Summary: Polyglot: allow UTF-8  to be declared with
                    meta@http-equiv="content-type"
    Classification: Unclassified
           Product: HTML WG
           Version: unspecified
          Hardware: PC
               URL: http://dev.w3.org/html5/html-xhtml-author-guide/#chara
                    cter-encoding
                OS: Linux
            Status: NEW
          Severity: enhancement
          Priority: P2
         Component: HTML/XHTML Compatibility Authoring Guide (ed: Eliot
                    Graff)
          Assignee: xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no
          Reporter: xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no
        QA Contact: public-html-bugzilla@w3.org
                CC: eliotgra@microsoft.com, mike@w3.org,
                    public-html-admin@w3.org,
                    public-html-wg-issue-tracking@w3.org

1. HTML5 permits exactly  <meta charset="UTF-8"/> in XHTML5 to help switch
between XHTML and HTML. 

2. The equivalent alternative version - <meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/> - is not permited.

3. Polyglot spec, with its focus on conformance with the HTMl5 spec, does
therefore today only permit the former - but not the latter.

4. However, fact is that in some implementation segments, the @charset variant
is not supported. For instance OpenOffice, on last check, did not support <meta
charset="UTF-8"/>. Thus, if the authors wants to support such implementations,
he/she has to not conformin to the polyglot spec

5. This seems odd, given that the HTML5 spec defines the two as alterantive
variants. Also, not having the option to use the http-equiv variant, takes away
one a robustness capability from polyglot markup.  And so, to fix this, the
@http-equiv variant should be made permitted polyglot markup.  

6. Ultimately, the HTML5 spec should say that the http-equiv variant should be
allowed in XHTML5 (and I will file a bug about that). But if this does not
happen, the polylglot spec should consider a willful violoation of the HTML5
spec in this detail.

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Received on Saturday, 2 March 2013 21:45:31 UTC