Re: Behavior of <meta> elements linking in stylesheets

> The HTML 4 specification contains statements about servers processing meta
> tags, and this was not a reality when they were written, still less

It seems to me that you are talking about meta http-equiv elements, not
meta elements in general.

Without implementation by the server, the common attempt to set
Pragma: no-cache (typically on pages that would benefit from some level
of caching!) won't work at all on shared caches, as they generally do
respect the protocol layering and don't look for meta elements.  Actually,
I don't think it would work anyway, as my reading of the HTTP specification
is that this Pragma only applies on requests, not responses!

> (so the spec is self-contradictory, since there's the above-mentioned
> general statement too - the spec both says it does not define <meta>
> semantics and actually defines it in some cases).

The spec is not self contradictory.  Giving character coding from the
server precedence is logical because it is something that is likely
to have been modifed when the resource was added to the server.  Such
modification can be done without looking at the structure of the document,
and will not change the meaning of a conforming document, unless the 
translation causes a loss of information.

This is a specific exception made for specific reasons.

Received on Sunday, 11 April 2004 06:57:13 UTC