No charset meta tag?

re: No charset meta tag?

Mike Dimmick — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 03:35:59 GMT

The server sends "Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8", so no need to worry.

If the meta tag was present it would override the header, I think (in current browsers; the HTML 4.01 spec still pretends that META HTTP-EQUIV is a hint to the server to output a header, which in fact no server has ever done, as far as I'm aware).

re: No charset meta tag?

Michael S. Kaplan — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 03:38:10 GMT

There are many times that the relationship between a standard and reality is a tenuous one. :-)

re: No charset meta tag?

Michael S. Kaplan — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 03:39:40 GMT

By the way, all this text looks good on a Vista machine (if you make allowances for the fact that I just serially entered characters and thus did not buid for proper shaping!)

re: No charset meta tag?

CornedBee — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 06:27:06 GMT

The server header overrides the meta tag. Or at least it should.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/charset.html#h-5.2.2
HTML 4.01 says:

> To sum up, conforming user agents must observe the
> following priorities when determining a document's
> character encoding (from highest priority to lowest):
>
> 1. An HTTP "charset" parameter in a "Content-Type" field.
> 2. A META declaration with "http-equiv" set to "Content-Type" and a value set for "charset".
> 3. The charset attribute set on an element that designates an external resource.

HTTP headers > meta tags

Maurits — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 18:50:13 GMT

IMHO, if you have an option to specify something as an HTTP header or a <meta http-equiv>, the HTTP header is usually the better option.

Why?

Well, for one thing, it's nice to know the character set before having to read any of the character data!

http-equiv/charset is a bit like keeping the key to a lockbox inside the lockbox :)

re: No charset meta tag?

Mihai — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 19:32:31 GMT

As with many other things, I think the answer for "what is best" is "it depends."
The HTTP header is decided by the server based on config files. And if your ISP (for some stupid reason) decided to set the header to iso-8859-1, you want to be able to override that.
And, in general, even if the ISP have set the server to utf-8, maybe I want to have the control!

You can sometimes have troubles if the content of the files do not match what the server thinks (on certain versions of certain servers). For instance server side includes will garble characters if the server is set to utf-8 and you use something else :-(
Good to remember: if you see that a one page frome the server is half good, half bad, and if you use server include, now you know one of the possible reasons.

It gets worse

Maurits — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 19:49:55 GMT

Check out http://blogs.msdn.com/

It returns a header:
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

But if you look at the source it includes a <meta> tag:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

Both can't be right. :) There's a č that's being served as raw C5A1, so I'm inclined to believe the UTF8 claim -- rather amusing that it's raw, since the à is being escaped as à

If the [IE7 on Vista ]browser doesn't have anything nice to display, it might display nothing?

Sorting It All Out — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 21:14:56 GMT

Another recent Suggestion Box item from favored "regular" reader Tanveer Badar: Another problem from