Re: flakey charset detection

Hi Martin,

> So what does this say? It says that MIME says us-ascii, http says
> iso-8859-1, and HTML says that you can't count on a default.
> It by no way says that the default is iso-8859-1.

Actually, it did, in the 4th and 5th lines you qouted.  Point
being that the protocol level very clearly defines that semantic,
which is why using charset= is only "strongly recommended".
It's a best practice issue, not a protocol revision.


> And if you check reality (around the world, not only in your
> neighborhood), you will find that the HTML spec is much
> closer to reality than the HTTP spec.

I'm not sure which reality you mean; there a number which
seem to co-exist.  But I guess I can see why the mostly-HTML
UA specs might want to insist on some explicit charset label.


>>>> p.s. Given that it's XHTML, I find the fact that it even _tried_
>>>>      using the META element to be worrisome ...
>>>
> 
> I would have to go and check the source to see if it indeed is
> checking META, but as you serve it as text/html, that doesn't
> seem to be inappropriate. It would complain if it found
> contradictory info. You may also assume that this is
> a message that covers various cases.

Sure, but to the extent that the new validator functions are
supposed to highlight potential errors, that seemed like one
(of doubtless many!) that'd be worth reporting, as a way to
promote xhtml interoperability.


Anyway, thanks for all the feedback, maybe some of it can
be used to improve that message.

- Dave


> 
> Regards,   Martin.
>

Received on Friday, 6 December 2002 11:42:03 UTC