- From: Liam Quinn <liam@htmlhelp.com>
- Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2002 12:57:51 -0400 (EDT)
- To: Lloyd Wood <l.wood@eim.surrey.ac.uk>
- cc: <www-validator@w3.org>
On Wed, 4 Sep 2002, Lloyd Wood wrote: > > > On Wed, 4 Sep 2002, Liam Quinn wrote: > > > > > > > On Wed, 4 Sep 2002, Lloyd Wood wrote: > > > > > > > > > On Wed, 4 Sep 2002, Olivier Thereaux wrote: > > > > > > > > > > > On Wed, Sep 04, 2002, Lloyd Wood wrote: > > > > > > > > Your server is sending the header > > > > > > > > Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii > > > > > > > > which overrides the charset specified within the HTML document. > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Surely the charset in the document should take precedence? > > > > > > > > > > > > No, see http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/charset.html#h-5.2.2 > > > > > > > > > > Thanks. > > > > > > > > > > I can't decide if that's a very subtle way to get Content-Type used > > > > > properly, or just very very broken. > > > > > > > > Well, consider a server (such as the original poster's) that transcodes > > > > HTML pages on-the-fly according to the capabilities of the client. It's > > > > trivial for the server to set the charset in the HTTP header, but changing > > > > a <meta> tag within the HTML document is much more difficult, especially > > > > when almost all HTML documents are invalid. > > > > > > In your example, how does the server know what charset to transcode > > > the page _from_? > > > > The server could use something like Apache's AddCharset directive, or it > > could use language-specific heuristics to detect the original character > > encoding. > > it wouldn't simply look at the charset in the document meta tag? I don't know. It would depend on the server. If I were writing a server, I'd want to avoid the expense and difficulty of parsing HTML. -- Liam Quinn
Received on Wednesday, 4 September 2002 12:57:52 UTC