Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
At 08:17 -0500 UTC, on 2006-11-05, Elliotte Harold wrote:
[...]
The specific problem is that an author may publish a correctly labeled
UTF-8 or ISO-8859-8 document or some such. However the server sends a
Content-type header that requires the parser to treat the document as
ISO-8859-1 or US-ASCII or something else.
Exactly in what sense would it be "correctly labelled" then?
In the internal sense. I.e. the author uploads an HTML document with the
right META element or an XML document with the right encoding
declaration, but the server ignores it.
The need is for server administrators to allow content authors to
specify content types and character sets for the documents they write.
Absolutely, yes. And my impression is that that's mostly the case already.
With Apache they can typically configure their part of the server through
.htaccess. Alternatively, if they use something like PHP, they can use that
to generate the proper HTTP header. Both are relatively common knowledge
amongst reasonably professional Web authors these days. For things like
blogs, the engine behind it can ensure proper Content-Type headers be
generated.
There are still a lot of servers out there that disallow .htaccess or
any equivalent, especially for low-level personal sites.
The only room I see for a HTML spec to say something about this is that you
could have it require that both [1] authors provide an appropriate META
HTTP-EQUIV Content-Type and [2] servers use that to generate an appropriate
HTTP Content-Type header. That's how, I'm told, this META HTTP-EQUIV was
meant to work initially. But in practice (almost?) no webservers do this, and
thus the insertion of a META HTTP-EQUIV often leads to situations with 2
conflicting Content-Type claims. So if you add such a requirement to the HTML
5 spec, you'll need make sure that server authors are on your side.
The W3C is working on this one more broadly than just HTML right now.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeaulait.org/books/javaio2/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596527500/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA/
