- From: Leif Halvard Silli <xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no>
- Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2013 04:37:28 +0200
- To: HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>, Robin Berjon <robin@berjon.com>
Bug 21174[1] against Polyglot Markup depends on bug 21818[2] against HTML5 proper. Would it be possible for the HTML5 spec’s editors to take a look at the latter bug in the near future? In my view, it should be simple to solve. The issue in bug 21818 is that while <meta charset="FOO"/> is permitted in XHTML (on the condition that the value of @charset is 'UTF-8'), the equivalent pragma directive in the encoding state (on the condition that the value of @content is 'text/html; charset=UTF-8'), is not permitted. Given that HTML5 says that the pragma directive in the encoding state is, quote: "just an alternative form of setting the charset attribute",[3] there appears no reason to not allow it in XHTML, as long as it sets the UTF-8 encoding. Given what HTML5 says, there should be no need to pay any attention to the string 'text/html;'. And XML parsers are anyhow not looking at this element whether when they decide the encoding or when they decide the MIME type. Both elements - <meta charset="UTF-8"/> and the equivalent meta@http-equiv variant - are pure text/html features. Our wish to add this variant of meta@http-equiv to Polyglot Markup, is part of Polyglot’s increased attention to the robustness principle. The use case for allowing it is that there are several HTML consumers out there (HTML import services found in everything from HTML generators to Office applications) which understand <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" … UTF-8" /> without whether understanding <meta charset="UTF-8"/>, the BOM or XML (and outside reach of HTTP). Occasionally there are also buggy HTML browsers (text browsers at least). One should not have to break out of polyglot profile in order to serve this class of consumers. We could add this to Polyglot without a change to HTML5 first. However, we like to keep the principle that we have had since the start, that Polyglot is a profile that is both conforming as XHTML5 and as HTML5. Hence we need HTMl5 to add it first. [1] https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=21174 [2] https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=21818 [3[ http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/document-metadata.html#attr-meta-http-equiv-content-type -- leif halvard silli
Received on Thursday, 25 April 2013 02:38:02 UTC