* Lars Marius Garshol | | It doesn't make much sense to have the meta statement there, as I | would expect most browser to assume ASCII compatibility, but I agree | that "must only be used" sounds too harsh. | | [...] | | it struck us: "if we can see that the page claims to be UTF-16, it | can't be, because our meta declaration scanning assumes ASCII | compatibility".
* Yves Arrouye | | I think you just answered why the spec says "must only be used" :) | it is so that the parsing of the meta tag can happen with | predictability. I don't see the sense of that, actually. XML handles auto-detection in the non-ASCII case quite well, and there's no reason why it couldn't be done for HTML as well. It's harder in HTML, of course, but by no means impossible. If they'd said something along the lines of "user agents are not required to support the META declaration in encodings that are not ASCII-compatible" and gone on to make sure that there were alternative methods that could be used in those cases, it would have been just as good, I think. -- Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian <URL: http://www.ontopia.net > ISO SC34/WG3, OASIS GeoLang TC <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >
