Re: [Lynx-dev] Re: progress on dev.10

[David Woolley]

David Dorward wrote:
> HTTP defaults for ISO-8859-1 for text/* documents which don't specify
> otherwise.

But HTML 4 overrides this and says that there is no default, but allows 
browsers to use heuristics on erroneous documents.  A default is, of 
course, one possible heuristic!

I think the intention is that they should either do a statistical 
analysis of the text, or assume the most common character set in the 
country in which they are used.

> >  However, I see the following
> >
> > <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
> > charset=iso-8859-1" />
> Ah, the wonder that is "http-equiv".
>
> Here is what the spec has to say on the subject:

However, the HTML specification specifically allows this construct for 
specifying the character set.  In HTML4, the real header has precedence. 
 I have a feeling that the HTML5 people have reversed this, not that I 
am a fan of HTML5 and its specification process.

What it can't do is override the media type, which has to be text/html 
for this to work at all.  I.E. specifying application/xml+xhtml here 
would be ineffective.



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David Woolley
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