On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 12:30 PM, Anthony J. Bentley <anthonyjbent...@gmail.com> wrote: >> So again, the complaint was that there was mojibake gibberish in >> Ingo's presentation, because the character encoding isn't specified >> but defaults to UTF-8 in modern browsers, while the page is actually >> iso-8859-1 encoded. > > Actually, "modern" browsers do not default to a particular encoding (in > fact, this violates the HTML standard). Instead, they attempt to autodetect > the charset. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't -- I've seen > UTF-8 pages incorrectly detected as ISO-8859-1, and in particularly bad > cases, vice versa.
i would consider firefox a modern browser, and it does not default to autodetect. it defaults to iso-8859-1 however, the gui does not allow per html doctype default charset, so a management configured browser would apply default charset to html1, 4, ... n there should be no case where this is a problem. all pages should be html 4 to avoid these silly exchanges. it would be nice if some sort of style guide clearly stated "pages in www/ are html4, charset explicitly set to iso-8859-1". in the absence of that, we have these discussions. having a www/STYLE doc does not require committing to a particular templating language so hopefully it's a realistic short-term goal
