- From: Olivier Thereaux <ot@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2002 09:44:09 +0900
- To: Lloyd Wood <l.wood@eim.surrey.ac.uk>
- Cc: www-validator@w3.org
On Wed, Sep 04, 2002, Lloyd Wood wrote: > On Wed, 4 Sep 2002, Liam Quinn wrote: > > > > 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_? Usually, transcoding servers are transcoding proxies, and they take the charset info from what the previous server sent in the HTTP headers. Let me note that the "the document knows its charset" VS "the server knows better" has been a hot topic for years. Yes, there was, a long time ago, a hot discussion between people wanting HTML documents to have some info about the charset, which was conflicting with the fact that HTTP had some charset headers; add to this the fact that many kinds of documents don't actually "know" their charset, and the problem with transcoding proxies, and you get the present situation. You might like or dislike the decision that has been taken long ago, but it's a bit late to change it, and I doubt this discussion on the HTML validator list has any interest (past the "what's the problem" "here's what the spec says" exchange), and as list maintainer I would like to ask participants to *not* get lost too far off-topic. Thank you. -- Olivier Thereaux - W3C http://www.w3.org/People/olivier | http://yoda.zoy.org
Received on Wednesday, 4 September 2002 20:44:11 UTC