Philippe Verdy, Thu, 29 Nov 2012 14:24:29 +0100: > And you forget the important part of Appendix A: > > *Consequence*: Remember, however, that when the XML declaration is not > included in a document, AND the character encoding is not specified by a > higher level protocol such as HTTP, the document can only use the default > character encodings UTF-8 or UTF-16. See, however, guideline > 9<http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/#C_9> > below. > > Here we have an XHTML site that is already encoded with the default UTF-8. > There's no reason then for Firefox or IE to render it with windows-1252, > even if they ignore the XML prolog. the "text/html" content-type remains > appropriate for XHTML 1.0, 1.1 or 5.0.
Note that point 1, which you quoted,[1] and all the rest of the entire note, is about how *authors* should behave when they create XHTML documents. The note is *not* about how user agents should behave. Also note that what you refer to as "the important part of Appendix A" ends in a sentence that points to guideline 9, which in turn tells authors to 'DO set the encoding via a "meta http-equiv"' and note that the example in guideline 9 uses UTF-8 as example, quote: '(e.g., <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />)'. ... > But why ? Isn't UTF-8 (or alternatively UTF-16) already the default > encoding of XHTML? > > If not, then we should file a bug in the W3C Validator for not honoring the > Guideline 9 (even though it is not part of the standard itself, but just a > recommendation, it should issue at least a warning). This is exactly the problem. Your "if not" does apply! Because, if one presents a XHTML document to the browser as HTML, then then windows-1252 - and not UTF-8 - becomes the default encoding. And, in fact, as consequence of our dialog, I have notified the developers of Unicorn about the shortcoming, asking them to issue a warning. [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/#C_1 [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/#C_9 -- leif halvard silli
