. Peter Constable wrote, > Doug's server may be doing the wrong thing, but that isn't a > counterargument to the general principle of whether the browser should > believe what the server says or what the document says about the encoding. > That was the question to which I and, I think, Jon were responding.
The specs list an order of priority in which character set information is sought. First, the browser checks the HTTP header, then the XML declaration (which is not relevant to HTML), then the HTML meta tag. Apparently, upon finding character set information, the operation stops, so if information is present in the HTTP header, the meta tag won't be consulted. This approach seems flawed -- illustrated by the problems caused by Adelphia's apparent incompetence in this regard. All of the data should be consulted and there should be some kind of protocol in place to handle conflicting character set info. In the event of a conflict between the HTTP header and the HTML meta tag, of course the browser should believe the HTML meta tag. After all, who knows better than the author the encoding used to construct the file? Where the server has performed a character set conversion upon request from a browser, then, as a part of the character set conversion process, the HTML meta tag needs to be re-written in case the page is archived by the visitor for later off-line viewing. If this were the case, we wouldn't be having this thread. Best regards, James Kass .
