295546 - Firefox overruns charset setting of webpage

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Simon Scheiwiller]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050524 Firefox/1.0.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050524 Firefox/1.0.3

http://mirror.vtx.ch/lfs/blfs/view/svn/ is displayed with utf-8 encoding, so the
(c) sign is displayed as a question mark (I don't have any utf-8 fonts
installed).  The website-source has:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="
    text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
and the default character encoding is set to western (iso-8859-1), but it's
overrun by firefox. It's impossible to choose the charset in View -> Character
Encoding, it switches back to utf-8 immediately.
It doesn't happen on http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/, which is
exactly the same code.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open http://mirror.vtx.ch/lfs/blfs/view/svn/
2. Try to change charset to iso-8859-1

Actual Results:  
charset jumps back to utf-8 automatically

Expected Results:  
choose the charset defined in the source code

Comment 1

[Josh Birnbaum]

Probably needs a <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?> at the beginning of
the file.  The linuxfromscratch server sends the file as HTML so it doesn't
matter; this other server sends it as XML which defaults to UTF-8 or UTF-16.

Comment 2

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

The servers send different headers :
http://mirror.vtx.ch/lfs/blfs/view/svn/-> Content-Type:	application/xhtml+xml

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/->Content-Type:	text/html;
charset=ISO-8859-1

and you must specify the charset like this if you don't send a different
encoding (XHTMl is default UTF-8) :
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

from http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#strict
An XML declaration is not required in all XML documents; however XHTML document
authors are strongly encouraged to use XML declarations in all their documents.
Such a declaration is required when the character encoding of the document is
other than the default UTF-8 or UTF-16 and no encoding was determined by a
higher-level protocol. Here is an example of an XHTML document. In this example,
the XML declaration is included.

marking invalid

That you can't override the character encoding is know and should be "fixed"
(=disabled menu) with bug 234628

Comment 3

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

(mid-air with Josh because this tab was in the "login state" :-)