- From: Nick Kew <nick@webthing.com>
- Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 13:11:07 +0100 (BST)
- To: www-validator@w3.org
> >Surely that at least is clear: [HTTP] takes precedence over [META]? > > Nope. HTTP 1.1 doesn't mention META, Of course not. > and HTML just sez it's supposed to be > read by _servers_ to initialize the HTTP header... :-( "supposed to be"? Oh dear. > >But *ML rules don't apply to HTTP, so whence the conclusion that > >*anything* is implicit (as opposed to absent) in the headers? > > The lack of a "charset" parameter on the HTTP 1.1 "Content-Type" header > field means that you should assume it is there with a value of "ISO-889-1" > according to the HTTP 1.1 RFC. Oh dear. Doesn't that logic give us: Content-Type: image/png; charset=iso-8859-1 or even Content-Type: application/x-hyperlens-object; charset=iso-8859-1 > That is, if the META sez EUC-JP and HTTP implicitly defines ISO-8859-1 (by > being absent), does that really mean that we should use ISO-8859-1 (which > the user obviously does _not_ want) over EUC-JP (which s/he _does_ want)? Only if we accept "HTTP implicitly defines ..." Now when HTTP explicitly defines something, we accept it. We can use the underlying fallacy of the <META> to get an instant contradiction: <meta http-equiv="content-type" contents="text/plain"> > >that might be considered as a sefault (certainly iso-8859-1 and utf-8)? > >so that a document that validates to it should always be fine? > > This is again very much Western thinking. US-ASCII is a subset only of > common Western encodings. This means the answer to your question depends on > whether you accept the validity of these "defaulted" charset parameters. Well yes - US-ASCII isn't fully up to English, let alone other languages. But we are only talking a default. > What does Site Valet do? Site valet is lots of tools, more than one of which process markup;-) Code Valet does exactly what you tell it in the form. Page Valet has very limited i18n support, and will use a documents declared charset or default to iso-8859-1 if none is declared. cg-eye's validation is similar to page valet, but more out-of-date (reminder to self ...) Tidy Online follows Dave Raggett's original in defaulting to ASCII, but allows you to change it with the tidyconf utility. -- Nick Kew
Received on Thursday, 26 July 2001 08:11:22 UTC