On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 7:43 PM, Philip Guenther <guent...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 4:17 PM, Andres Perera <andre...@zoho.com> wrote: > ... >> that page is encoded iso 8859-1, doesn't state so anywhere, breaks >> with browsers configured to default to utf8 in the absence of encoding >> qualifiers > > Those browsers are violating the HTTP/1.1 standard. RFC 2616, section > 3.7.1, paragraph 4: > > The "charset" parameter is used with some media types to define the > character set (section 3.4) of the data. When no explicit charset > parameter is provided by the sender, media subtypes of the "text" > type are defined to have a default charset value of "ISO-8859-1" when > received via HTTP. Data in character sets other than "ISO-8859-1" or > its subsets MUST be labeled with an appropriate charset value. See > section 3.4.1 for compatibility problems.
firefox and ie are nice enough to assume iso-8859-1. that's not the case with management configured browsers, where RFCs don't mean a damn > > > And then there's section 3.4.1: > > 3.4.1 Missing Charset > > Some HTTP/1.0 software has interpreted a Content-Type header without > charset parameter incorrectly to mean "recipient should guess." > Senders wishing to defeat this behavior MAY include a charset > parameter even when the charset is ISO-8859-1 and SHOULD do so when > it is known that it will not confuse the recipient. > > Unfortunately, some older HTTP/1.0 clients did not deal properly with > an explicit charset parameter. HTTP/1.1 recipients MUST respect the > charset label provided by the sender; and those user agents that have > a provision to "guess" a charset MUST use the charset from the > content-type field if they support that charset, rather than the > recipient's preference, when initially displaying a document. See > section 3.7.1. > > > Wait, was that a warning that an explicit charset parameter broke some > older browsers? Huh... wtf? a charset parameter is present in www/index.html so i guess that particular page isn't catering to an unrealistic section of an rfc i sense some conflicting interests here > > > Philip Guenther
