Re: UTF-16 and HTML META charset

From: Erik van der Poel (erik@netscape.com)
Date: Sun Feb 20 2000 - 01:44:49 EST


Piotr Trzcionkowski wrote:
>
> From: "Erik van der Poel" <erik@netscape.com>
> >
> > HTML's META charset does not work for non-ASCII-based character
> > encodings, such as UTF-16, UCS-4 and EBCDIC.
>
> It "works" the same with ANY declaration in body :-))))

Once the browser has decided that it is UTF-16, it must of course ignore
any META charset that might appear.

> Internet package from your organization Netscape even ignore meta
> declaration in body.

The browser is supposed to ignore META charset when HTTP charset is
present. Which version of Netscape did you test? That version may have a
bug in META charset handling.

> Did you found a browser which support Unicode and don't check bom code?

No.

> Of course, but i have no access to change header.

It really is a pity that there are such barriers to the use of HTTP
charset in the real world... :-(

> And I'm not sure that some "intelligent" admin won't use it for
> blocking on proxy cache :-))) as done on polish Usenet with utf-8.

Interesting. Do you have any evidence that some people block HTTP
traffic based on their charset?

Erik



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