A misuse of the term "character" in REC-html40

Editors,

The term "character" looks misused in the following sentence.

   The META declaration must only be used when the character encoding
   is organized such that ASCII characters stand for themselves (at
   least until the META element is parsed).

   (5.2.2 Specifying the character encoding)

I believe that the intention of this sentence is that it is okay when
the received *octets* (not characters) stand for ASCII characters.

The sentence mentioning the same issue in RFC 2070 seems more exact
than HTML 4.0.  It says:

   This is not foolproof, but will work if the encoding scheme is such
   that ASCII-valued octets stand for ASCII characters only at least
   until the META element is parsed.

So I consider the word "ASCII characters" of the HTML 4.0 spec quoted
above to be replaced with "ASCII-valued octets".

Regards,

Yano Keisuke
yano@moon.email.ne.jp

Received on Thursday, 20 May 1999 13:03:05 UTC