Charset (Was: [Javascript] JS Marquee - Advanced!)

[Scott Reynen]

On Aug 13, 2006, at 12:30 PM, Troy III Ajnej wrote:

> Try, view, source of the same document or
> http://validator.w3.org
> and see if you can find the charset meta anywhere.
> Since you will not... -there isn't one!

I might be missing the point here, but the lack of a charset in the  
source doesn't mean the document has no stated charset.  If you look  
at the headers for that document, you'll see the charset is stated  
there:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Before the document is sent, which is ideal if you have such control  
over headers, but not everyone does, hence the <meta> option.

> The charset encoding depends on your choice while first naming and  
> saving your
> document from your chosen editor, not on your meta description.
> The browser might take you for your word and try to read/render the  
> document
> according to your wrong description. But most browsers are smart  
> and the first
> encountered mismatch they fallback to auto-detection and re-read  
> the content using
> the correct encoding/decoding scheme.

Potential discrepancy between the actual and stated charset is a not  
a good reason to avoid stating a charset, rather it's a good reason  
to take care to state the correct, actual charset.  User agents can't  
be assumed to reliably auto-detect.  Not only do some not even try,  
but those that do can't possibly auto-detect everything due to  
overlapping code ranges.  Auto-detection is an imperfect guessing  
game, which I assume is what Rasmus was saying.  That he conflated  
stated and actual charset doesn't make it any less important to  
explicitly state charset.

Peace,
Scott