Re: Getting beyond the ping pong match (was RE: Cleaning House)

Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
>     invalid; that'd be ridiculous, but after http-equiv=Content-Type
>     being made invalid I fully expect even the most outrageous nonsense
>     to come out of the "WHATWG", so, who knows.

Although I only mentioned this in passing before, as I don't really have 
the time to do a thorough review of the whole document....

We are currently making rather slow progress in educating authors that 
omitting the character set doesn't mean "the code page that my Windows 
machine uses and which you have to guess", or worse still, "the glyph 
set that I use with a custom font to get round the lack of commercial 
support for documents in my language and you had better have read up how 
to use the site before accessing it".

If we now start telling people to do it in a different way, they will 
get confused, and those with legacy browsers will still see weird 
characters when they are set to guess based on a different character set.

Also, http-equiv has been redefined as "pragma", when it had a clear 
meaning that the information provided could also be sent using HTTP. 
Even Refresh, although not an official HTTP header, can be sent as HTTP 
on the browsers I've tried, and is useful for non-HTML media types, for 
which there is no concept of an HTML meta element.  There are some 
abuses of this.  People send something that is only actually allowed in 
HTTP requests, in the hope that it defeats caching; I suspect it does 
defeat user agent caching, because user agents try to act as users expect.

Moreover, the specification then adds Dns under the non-http-equiv 
version, when I would argue that Dns is clearly a pragma in terms of the 
understanding of that word for programming languages.

Received on Sunday, 6 May 2007 12:49:09 UTC