Re: Disturbing IE 4.0pp2 behavior for lang="en"

Benjamin Franz writes:
> On Fri, 22 Aug 1997, E. Stephen Mack wrote:
> 
> > I was testing the new HTML 4.0 entities in IE 4.0 pp2.
> > Here's a fragment of a test document:
> > 
> > <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN">
> > <HTML LANG="EN">
> > <HEAD>
> > <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" value="text/html; charset='UTF-8'">
>                                                             ^^^^^^^
> This is the second time I have seen someone assert (either explicitly or
> implicitly) that the charset should be contained in quotes. I looked
> through the HTTP1.1 spec and could not find anything suggesting that this
> was either necessary or even acceptable, and it appears to conflict with
> actual usage for most documents I have seen. Where is this coming from?
> 
> -- 
> Benjamin Franz
> 

Pages 24 and 25 of the spec:

   HTTP uses Internet Media Types  in the Content-Type (section 14.18)
   and Accept (section 14.1) header fields in order to provide open and
   extensible data typing and type negotiation.

          media-type     = type "/" subtype *( ";" parameter )
          type           = token
          subtype        = token

   Parameters may follow the type/subtype in the form of attribute/value
   pairs.

          parameter      = attribute "=" value
          attribute      = token
          value          = token | quoted-string

Looks to me like you should be able to quote it or not, as you please, because
in this case the parameter value (UTF-8) is a valid token.

However, quoted string is defined to use the double quote (top of page 16).
SGML and HTML allow you to use either paired double or single quotes.

	-- Mary
	   Holstege@firstfloor.com

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| FirstFloor Software, Inc.               (650) 254-5161
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Received on Friday, 22 August 1997 11:06:58 UTC