On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 3:45 PM, Dave Anderson <d...@daveanderson.com> wrote: > On Thu, 28 Jun 2012, frantisek holop wrote: > >>hmm, on Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 09:47:00AM -0400, Dave Anderson said that >>> Using META is _ugly_, especially for specifying a charset (since the >>> page will be read up through the META element using the charset >>> specified in the real header or assumed by the browser -- and that >>> charset could be incompatible with the actual encoding.) Why not just >>> use the AddDefaultCharset directive to ensure that a charset is >>> specified in the real header for all pages? Or is this known to break >>> some browsers that are still in use? >> >>because AddDefaultCharset is a braindead concept. > > No, just one that needs to be applied only when appropriate. The truly > braindead idea is that of partially parsing a file in order to find out > what charset you should have been using in doing that parsing. This > only "mostly works" because, for the typical page content from the > beginning through any META elements, the encoding specified by most > charset values happens to match the encoding specified by 8859-1.
[...] the cool thing about tags is that you can access; e.g., local man pages through file:// and have a properly decoded page. no need for a server most charsets coincide with the first 127 characters of ascii, so what's the problem anyway. yea some browsers will reread the whole html but it's a minimal cost if you place the meta tag at the beginning
