Re: Character set for the HTML documentation

[Geoff Richards <qef@ungwe.org>]

On Tue, Jul 17, 2007 at 04:31:55PM -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> I just got the following email:
> 
> > The Git documentation at
> > <http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/user-manual.html> is
> > encoded in ISO 8859-1, but it is being served with a content-type header
> > of "text/plain; charset=UTF-8".
> > 
> > The content-type header overrides the value declared in the <meta> tag
> > of the HTML document, so this causes browsers to render the
> > documentation incorrectly.
> > 
> > Apologies if this is a well known issue and you get a lot of mail like
> > this BTW, just don't LART me too hard. ;)
> 
> The fact that browsers behave this way is of course a bug, but it's a
> common one.  Can we switch the documentation over to UTF-8, this is 2007
> after all...?

Unfortunately, it's not a bug.  The correct thing for a browser to do is
give the 'Content-Type' HTTP header priority over the <meta> element.
It's defined in an RFC somewhere.

Best thing to do is tell Apache (or whatever) not to send the HTTP
header ("AddDefaultCharset off"), and make sure all the HTML has a
correct <meta> element specifying the encoding.

And yes, putting everything in UTF-8 unless you've got a specific reason
not to is probably going to make life simpler as well.

HTH,
   geoff