Re: charset=us-ascii mandatory?

On Wed, 9 May 2007, Andreas Prilop wrote:

> On Tue, 8 May 2007, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>
>> Is there some practical problem behind your question?
>
> Not a severe problem. I don't want to specify an encoding for
> http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/temp/lang-attribute.htm
> because I want the reader to select any encoding in his browser.

I see. I have a test page
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars/test.htm
without any charset declaration, for testing browser behavior, but I never 
thought it would be a formally correct page - just an intentionally broken 
page for testing.

> "charset=us-ascii" is taken by browsers to mean "charset=iso-8859-1".

So it seems. Somewhat surprisingly, IE 7 treats octets > 9F (hex.) 
according to iso-8859-1 but displays octets 80..9F as unrepresentable
(though it still treats assigned windows-1252 code positions differently 
from unassigned).

Anyway, that's not a validator issue. What matters in validation is that 
when us-ascii is declared, the validator properly reports octets > 7F as 
erroneous data.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Thursday, 10 May 2007 11:10:33 UTC