Re: BPWG's comments on XHTML Basic 1.1 Editor's draft of 2006-11-01

Hi Jo,

Sorry for the delay in replying to this. Please note that comments on  
XHTML Basic working drafts should be sent to www-html-editor@w3.org, to  
ensure that they are correctly tracked. (I have added it as a CC to this  
reply).

On Thu, 07 Dec 2006 18:21:21 +0100, Jo Rabin <jo@linguafranca.org> wrote:
> 4. Character Encoding Declaration
>
> We would appreciate clarification of how to determine the declared  
> character
> encoding of an XHTML Basic 1.1 document.

I would like to draw your attention to a document that summarises this  
admirably:
XHTML Media Types
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/

and in particular the section
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/#text-html

I think this should answer your quesstions, but if it doesn't, please  
don't hesitate to ask.

Best wishes,

Steven Pemberton

>
> There seem to be a number of alternatives and the possibility of
> contradiction between them.
>
> In particular, our understanding is that documents delivered with a  
> content
> type header of text/*, without stating a character encoding, default to
> iso-8859-1. This is in contradiction, however, to section 5.2.2 of HTML  
> 4.01
> [6] which states that the default should be disregarded in this case and
> that a meta http-equiv construct should used instead.
>
> There is the further possibility that this will be contradicted by the
> presence of a Byte Order Mark and/or by the presence of an XML  
> declaration
> with or without an encoding attribute.
>
> We do feel that this situation needs clarification, and we would prefer  
> if
> the means of determining character encoding were to be spelled out.  
> mobileOK
> tests need to determine what the character encoding is, and we feel it
> important that implementations of mobileOK tests are consistent in
> determining character encoding.
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Group/2006/ED-xhtml-basic-20061101/
> [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/mobile-bp/
> [3] http://www.w3.org/2005/MWI/BPWG/Group/Drafts/mobileOK-Tests/
> [4] http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Group/2006/ED-xhtml-basic-20061101/s2.1
> [5] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/
> [6] http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/charset.html#h-5.2.2
>

Received on Friday, 16 February 2007 14:03:51 UTC