RE: Non-ASCII characters in XHTML

> From:	Alf Inge Myhre Tunheim [SMTP:tunheim@operamail.com]
> 
> Is it against the XHTML recomendation to use non-ASCII characters in an 
> XHTML-document before the <meta>-charset tag? Can it result in errors? (In
> 
> this case I assume the server hasn't sent the character set in the MIME 
> header)
	 
	[DJW:]  Even if this is not strictly necessary, it should
	always be achievable, and is therefore a sensible thing to
	do.  In any case, the right place for Content-Type...charset 
	is in the real HTTP headers.

	[DJW:]  I presume you meant the meta element with 
	http-equiv of Content-Type and a value including the
	charset parameter in a document whose real Content-Type
	doesn't include that parameter or which was not served with
	HTTP.

From the spec:
To address server or configuration limitations, HTML documents may include

[DJW:} I.E. if the server doesn't allow Content-Type to be configured
properly, or the
web hosting company doesn't allow their customers access to the right
configuration level in the server to do this.

explicit information about the document's character encoding; the META
element can
be used to provide user agents with this information.
For example, to specify that the character encoding of the current document
is
"EUC-JP", a document should include the following META declaration:
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=EUC-JP">
The META declaration must only be used when the character encoding is
organized such that ASCII-valued bytes stand for themselves (at least until
the META
element is parsed). META declarations should appear as early as possible in
the
	HEAD element.

Received on Tuesday, 4 July 2000 12:24:36 UTC