Re: [VE][html5] Character Set ISO-8859-1 vs windows-1252

2013-03-21 23:03, Christopher Head wrote:

> I verified a document with <meta charset="ISO-8859-1">. The validator
> reported that "Bad value ISO-8859-1 for attribute charset on element
> meta: iso-8859-1 is not a preferred encoding name. The preferred label
> for this encoding is windows-1252.".

This is a bug in the W3C Validator. It does not exist at 
http://validator.nu on which the W3C Validator is based. So this will 
probably be fixed in a few weeks or years.

Both validators issue the following warning:

"Using windows-1252 instead of the declared encoding iso-8859-1."

The W3C Validator is currently over-eager in propagating the idea that 
when iso-8859-1 is declared, browsers will (and shall) actually use 
windows-1252.

>ISO-8859-1 *is* a preferred MIME name, and windows-1252
> is not!

This is a misunderstanding. They are both preferred MIME names, for two 
different encodings. The registry
http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets/character-sets.xml
is partly misleading, because "Preferred MIME name" is really relevant 
only for encodings that have multiple names. If there is no name in that 
column, then the "Name" column contains the single name, which is 
trivially the preferred name. What makes it misleading is that for 
windows-1252, and many other encodings, there *are* alias names. This is 
meant to imply that the name in the "Name" column is preferred.

Yucca

Received on Friday, 22 March 2013 13:52:38 UTC