RE: [OT] charset (was: how to get an NCR in the output

Tobias,

I think the RFC text you quoted supported what I've said: if there is no
charset parameter for "text/html", it defaults to ISO-8859-1 (no matter what
the entity body says). Basically this means that you either have to serve
ISO-8859-1 encoded content, or must set the charset parameter properly.

No, I don't like this as well (and I think the standards bodies agree in
retrospective). But this is what it currently says.

Julian

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> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:owner-xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Tobias Reif
> Sent: Sunday, January 05, 2003 3:18 PM
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject:  [OT] charset (was: how to get an NCR in the output?)
>
>
> Julian Reschke wrote:
>
>  > Tobias,
>  >
>  > AFAIK, the default for content type "text/html" *is* ISO-8859-1.
>
> I don't think that it's as simple as that: one IETF spec says "The
> default character set, which must be assumed in the absence of a charset
> parameter, is US-ASCII."
>
> As I said, I'm sending XHTML as text/html (since it's "HTML compatible").
> In this case, the IETF says the following about the charset parameter:
>
> http://ietf.org/rfc/rfc2854.txt
> The 'text/html' Media Type
> "
>   charset
>           The optional parameter "charset" refers to the character
>           encoding used to represent the HTML document as a sequence of
>           bytes. Any registered IANA charset may be used, but UTF-8 is
>           preferred.  Although this parameter is optional, it is strongly
>           recommended that it always be present. See Section 6 below for
>           a discussion of charset default rules.
> [...]
> 6. Charset default rules
>
>     The use of an explicit charset parameter is strongly recommended.
>     While [MIME] specifies "The default character set, which must be
>     assumed in the absence of a charset parameter, is US-ASCII."  [HTTP]
>     Section 3.7.1, defines that "media subtypes of the 'text' type are
>     defined to have a default charset value of 'ISO-8859-1'".  Section
>     19.3 of [HTTP] gives additional guidelines.  Using an explicit
>     charset parameter will help avoid confusion.
>
>     Using an explicit charset parameter also takes into account that the
>     overwhelming majority of deployed browsers are set to use something
>     else than 'ISO-8859-1' as the default; the actual default is either a
>     corporate character encoding or character encodings widely deployed
>     in a certain national or regional community. For further
>     considerations, please also see Section 5.2 of [HTML40].
> "
>
> Personally, for XML sent as XML (eg SVG or XHTML), I think I'd prefer
> that the XML prolog would always overrule the charset param if present,
> and that the charset param would never be required, but the encoding=""
> in the XML prolog.
>
> Tobi
>
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