html authoring technique : charset in http header

Martin Duerst wrote:

> At 12:37 03/10/23 +0100, Richard Ishida wrote:
>
>> Charset Declaration
>> We discussed the first technique in section 3.2
>> http://www.w3.org/International/geo/html-tech/#ri20030218.131104811
>> which involved a discussion about transcoding by servers.
>> We agreed in principle that we should recommend that people should
>> NOT
>> declare the encoding using the HTTP header, but rely instead on
>> declarations inside the document.
>
>
> I'm really not sure about this. There is nothing bad at all with
> having the right HTTP header. Recommending that people do NOT
> use it clearly sends the wrong message.

  I feel the same way as Martin. The technique in question seems to be
reasonable as it is in the editor's copy.  It also has to be noted that
a lot of dynamic contents are generated with charset emitted in http
header.

>> There may be
>> exceptional cases, such as Tim Bray's site, where he only uses server
>> settings because he has complete control over his pages and
>> environment.

  In case of Apache,  as is well known, unless the system admin blocks
users from configuring http header for their documents, individual users
(non-admin) do have a complete control over their documents served by
Apache. I realize it's not the case with other servers (especially with
IIS), but my point is that Tim Bray is not the only one with a complete
control.


>> ACTION: Tex, look at Google's cache to see how that works vis a vis
>> transcoding

  To my surprise, google's cache doesn't transcode. Instead, it serves
cached documents in their *original* encoding with  html meta tag with
C-T charset prepended. (I made sure that google does that even when
the original documents don't have html meta tag.)  Actually, the way
google serves cached pages is not standard-compliant because it
blindly emits 'meta information' (with actual html tags like table)
before <html> as shown below (so that thosed cached pages wouldn't get
validated).

------------Cut-----------Here---------------
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=EUC-KR">
<base HREF="http://www.msquare.or.kr/">
<table border=1 ....

....... disclaimer and other meta information......

<!--- the original page conent begins here : comment is mine -->
<html>
...... original content .....
----------------------

  Jungshik

Received on Friday, 24 October 2003 05:13:06 UTC