Re: GSM and Unicode

Wed, 05 Nov 2003 12:37:10 -0800

In a message dated 11/5/2003 2:59:00 AM Pacific Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
From: "John Delacour" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

> At 3:48 pm -0500 4/11/03, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> >  In a message dated 11/4/2003 12:27:04 PM Pacific Standard Time,
> > [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
> >
> >
> >  GSM charsets are mostly from MES-1,etc
>
> This styled message contained (thanks to Microsoft) this line in the head:
>
> >  <META charset=UTF-8 http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html;
> > charset=utf-8">
>
> So far as I can tell, this is gibberish and ought to be
>
> >  <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
>
> My browser seems to agree with me, but I await correction.

That's normal: in HTML 4- (but not in XML or XHTML) attributes are accepted
without quotes, in some limits. Also the letter case of attribute names
(like element names) is not significant, and in both HTML and XML the order
of attributes is never significant.

So the only strange thing in this header is the presence of the
'charset=UTF-8' extra attribute in the meta element. I don't know for which
browser or mail reader this is included, as it is normally set within the
value of the 'content' attribute when the 'http-equiv' attribute is set to
"Content-Type" (case not significant for this value). It is extremely
probable that this non standard extension 'charset' attribute name is
ignored, so the value specified for the standard 'content' attribute name
takes precedence.
I think the reason that we see page which have <meta charset=""> is because the old charset detection code we put into Netscape 2.0 way back in early 1996 is very "loose". that code is not build into the paser but in a pre-parsing STREAM filter. It is a simple sniffer for performance reason and it cannot be in the parser because you need to detect, and convert the charset before hand those data to the parser for the reason of ISO-2002-JP. Because of the loose of that old meta charset detection code, page have those tag will ALSO gracefully work with Netscape 2.0 till 4.x . (We are force to also make it work for Netscape 7 and Mozilla later becasue of that I believe. MS probably do the samething for IE because of the same reason). Although Netscape never put down any document to advertise that, people somehow find that is shorter than the "right way" and also it work with major browser in that time so some people start to use it. I believe it is where all it come from . You can still find that old code in
That code is no longer used by new Mozilla code base after 1999 nor Netscape 6 or 7.
 
 
 
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Frank Yung-Fong Tang
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