- From: Jelks Cabaniss <jelks@jelks.nu>
- Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 21:08:17 -0400
- To: <www-html@w3.org>
Dan Connolly mentioned (some while ago):
> http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2854.txt
where it says (among other things):
In addition, [XHTML1] defines a profile of use of XHTML which is
compatible with HTML 4.01 and which may also be labeled as
text/html.
...
XHTML documents (optionally) start with an XML declaration which
begins with "<?xml" and are required to have a DOCTYPE declaration
"<!DOCTYPE html".
...
The use of an explicit charset parameter is strongly recommended.
While [MIME] specifies "The default character set, which must be
assumed in the absence of a charset parameter, is US-ASCII." [HTTP]
Section 3.7.1, defines that "media subtypes of the 'text' type are
defined to have a default charset value of 'ISO-8859-1'". Section
19.3 of [HTTP] gives additional guidelines. Using an explicit
charset parameter will help avoid confusion.
Using an explicit charset parameter also takes into account that the
overwhelming majority of deployed browsers are set to use something
else than 'ISO-8859-1' as the default; the actual default is either a
corporate character encoding or character encodings widely deployed
in a certain national or regional community. For further
considerations, please also see Section 5.2 of [HTML40].
This should perhaps also mention that XHTML documents are (being XML) by
default UTF-8 if you omit the XML declaration. How that is reconciled with
text/* defaulting to ISO-8859-1, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's a further
indication that text/html may be unsuitable for XHTML.
?
/Jelks
Received on Monday, 2 October 2000 21:12:39 UTC