Re: possible bug in the validator?

On Wed, 4 Sep 2002, Lloyd Wood wrote:

> On Wed, 4 Sep 2002, Olivier Thereaux wrote:
>
> > On Wed, Sep 04, 2002, Lloyd Wood wrote:
> > > > Your server is sending the header
> > > > Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii
> > > > which overrides the charset specified within the HTML document.
> > >
> > > Surely the charset in the document should take precedence?
> >
> > No, see http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/charset.html#h-5.2.2
>
> Thanks.
>
> I can't decide if that's a very subtle way to get Content-Type used
> properly, or just very very broken.

Well, consider a server (such as the original poster's) that transcodes
HTML pages on-the-fly according to the capabilities of the client.  It's
trivial for the server to set the charset in the HTTP header, but changing
a <meta> tag within the HTML document is much more difficult, especially
when almost all HTML documents are invalid.

-- 
Liam Quinn