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Re: [tlug] Firefox 3.0.1 doesn't respect <meta http-equiv="content-type">

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Edward Middleton writes:
>Out-of-band(e.g. in headers) methods like http > headers support all the previously mentioned cases.

But the META element *is* a header!!  Using the HTTP transport

----------------------------------------------------------------
Content-Type: text

<hmtl>
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=koi8-r">
  </head>
----------------------------------------------------------------

etc etc is no different in principle from

----------------------------------------------------------------
Content-Type: multipart/mixed
Boundary: blah-blah-blah

--blah-blah-blah
Content-Type: text/html; charset=koi8-r

----------------------------------------------------------------

with the SMTP transport!

In principle but very different in what it can be applied to, meta tags only work for html the above Content-Type works for almost any type.

 > explicitly told your apache webserver to assume all HTML files are
 > encoded using the UTF-8 charset, unless told otherwise (and it
 > apparently doesn't consider meta tags).  This is an apache
 > configuration issue and has nothing to do with merits of in-band
 > out-of-band metadata.

Of course it does. It shows that out-of-band metadata is no more
reliable than in-band metadata, so that Curt putting down the META tag
because it can't deal with insane metadata is bogus.

Well out of band(http headers) works for both cases and in band(html meta headers) only works for HTML, using two mechanisms means you have the potential for conflict and more importantly it becomes more difficult to debug because the behavior is somewhat undefined (at least for each browser implementation).

> What is "inherently dumb" is unnecessarily coupling the web server to > the type of files it serves.

But I wasn't talking about what the *server* should do. I'm talking
about what the *client* should do. AFAIK Curt understood that.

The server has to understand the content of the file to avoid sending conflicting headers, from an implementation point of view this is pretty crazy which is perhaps why apache doesn't check.

Edward

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