[whatwg] [WA1] Specifying Character Encoding

[Henri Sivonen]

On Apr 9, 2005, at 09:29, Lachlan Hunt wrote:

> In the current draft, for specifying the character encoding [1], it is 
> stated:
...
> | Authors should avoid including inline character encoding information.

Since many current UAs do not reserialize docs with inline character 
encoding information when saving to disk, I think it is appropriate and 
mostly harmless to specify UTF-8 both in the HTTP header and inline.

> For X(HT)ML, according to the Architecture of the World Wide Web, 
> Volume One - Media types for XML [2]:
>
> | In general, a representation provider SHOULD NOT specify the 
> character
> | encoding for XML data in protocol headers since the data is
> | self-describing.

Too bad RFC 3023 gives bad advice and insists on harmful defaults for 
text/*.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/