266791 - meta charset in HTML does not override server charset in HTTP

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, defect)

Description

[andrew]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913

In Apache 2, the server normally specifies a default charset
so that documents are sent with e.g. "Content-Type: text/html; charset="utf-8"
This is recommended for security reasons, according to the comments.

If an author creates a document with e.g. 
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
the server charset (UTF-8) is still used, causing rendering problems.
Since documents in many charsets may exist on one server, and authors
rarely have access to the server configuration, the document-supplied
charset should have preference.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.Place HTML document on Apache server with different charset than server default
2.View document in Mozilla


Actual Results:  
Document appears with server default charset

Expected Results:  
Document appears in document-specified charset

Comment 1

[andrew]

It seems that this is the way it's supposed to work, though it's
potentially frustrating for users.


http://www.webstandards.org/learn/askw3c/dec2002.html

To sum it up

    * Wrong. The webmaster sets a default character encoding to be sent by the
server but does not let the author override it or the info is not provided
anywhere whatsoever
    * Good. The character encoding is not set at the server level but properly
declared through the HTML meta element (and/or the XML declaration for XHTML
documents)
    * Best. The character encoding is properly set at the server level, either
with a default that authors can override or on a per-document basis, and is also
available at the document level (both in the XML declaration if applicable and
the meta element) for standalone use

Comment 2

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

*** Bug 270062 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***