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Re: [tlug] Firefox 3.0.1 doesn't respect <meta http-equiv="content-type">

Edward Middleton writes:
 > Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

 > > The most obviously contradicted fact is that the standard specifies
 > > that when the META element is used, the file's encoding should be
 > > ASCII-compatible.  That's all you need.  Note that the XML standard
 > > does exactly the same thing, except for making a hard requirement of a
 > > much more useful ASCII-compatible default (ie, UTF-8).  It's
 > > interesting that somebody is claiming that this is "inherently stupid"
 > > when a couple of decades of experience with similar systems has led to
 > > continual refinement and strengthening of this specification.

 > Well it works accept in the corner cases like text files on a website or 
 > source code where there isn't an in-band (i.e. in file) means of 
 > indicating the encoding.  Out-of-band(e.g. in headers) methods like http 
 > headers support all the previously mentioned cases.

But the META element *is* a header!!  Using the HTTP transport

----------------------------------------------------------------
Content-Type: text

<hmtl>
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=koi8-r">
  </head>
----------------------------------------------------------------

etc etc is no different in principle from

----------------------------------------------------------------
Content-Type: multipart/mixed
Boundary: blah-blah-blah

--blah-blah-blah
Content-Type: text/html; charset=koi8-r

----------------------------------------------------------------

with the SMTP transport!

 > By setting AddDefaultCharset to UTF-8 your web administrator (presumably 
 > you)

The problem is that it wasn't me, AFAICR.

 > explicitly told your apache webserver to assume all HTML files are
 > encoded using the UTF-8 charset, unless told otherwise (and it
 > apparently doesn't consider meta tags).  This is an apache
 > configuration issue and has nothing to do with merits of in-band
 > out-of-band metadata.

Of course it does.  It shows that out-of-band metadata is no more
reliable than in-band metadata, so that Curt putting down the META tag
because it can't deal with insane metadata is bogus.

 > What is "inherently dumb" is unnecessarily coupling the web server to 
 > the type of files it serves.

But I wasn't talking about what the *server* should do.  I'm talking
about what the *client* should do.  AFAIK Curt understood that.
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