Re: 8-bit chars in US-ASCII documents (was Re: Embarrassing typo!)

On 27.04.01 at 15:50, Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net> wrote:

>* Terje Bless wrote:
>>On 23.04.01 at 00:43, Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net> wrote:
>>
>>>Btw. this is, as I'm sure you know, worse for HTML documents. XML
>>>documents can be encoded in UTF-8 or UTF-16 without declaring it,
>>>HTML can't, you must always declare the used encoding, since the user
>>>agent must not assume any default character encoding.
>>
>>IIRC, we still have that ISO-8859-1 default from the HTTP/1.1 spec, non?
>
>See HTML 4.01 section 5.2.2, 'Therefore, user agents must not assume any
>default value for the "charset" parameter'.

How practical is it to put this into production? If the validator makes no
assumptions, will it make people fix their servers? Should this be
retroactively applied to earlier HTML versions? What says the W3C HTML
Reccomendation overrules the IETF's HTTP Standard?

I'm unconvinced we can usefully follow that reccomendation.

Wanna try changing my mind? :-)

Received on Friday, 27 April 2001 19:36:49 UTC