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

On 2008-09-12 15:43 +0900 (Fri), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> But the META element *is* a header!!

It is patently not. It is part of the document, and in fact, from my
quick reading of the standard, is usually mis-used, and certainly is
misused by you in your case (supplying a charset when the server does
not supply one). Your example also is incorrect in this way; the HTML spec
says nothing about MIME via SMTP 

Were your examples intended to be examples of bad usage?

> Using the HTTP transport
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> Content-Type: text
> 
> <hmtl>
>   <head>
>     <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=koi8-r">
>   </head>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------

According to the spec:

    The http-equiv attribute can be used in place of the name attribute
    and has a special significance when documents are retrieved via
    the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). HTTP servers may use the
    property name specified by the http-equiv attribute to create an
    [RFC822]-style header in the HTTP response.

    http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.4.4.2

It says nothing about clients combining information from the
content-type header and the meta tag, as you appear to be doing here.

> 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!

I'm not sure where the SMTP transport comes into this, since the example
above has nothing to do with SMTP. It appears to be a MIME mail message,
which would frequently be the (unparsed) content of an SMTP DATA chunk.

And I have no idea where this example was going. Basically, you have
an HTTP Content-type header and a different MIME Content-type header
("text" and "text/html; charset=koi8-r" are not the same string), and
then you've got some HTML that's supposed to be clues for web servers
to modify their content-type header, which apparently the web server in
your example didn't take advantage of.

> 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 client, it appears, should do nothing, and entirely ignore the META
tags.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974   
Mobile sites and software consulting: http://www.starling-software.com
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