Re: LYNX-DEV Lynx bookmark display problems

[David Woolley]

> Also, does HTML 4.0 support multiple document encoding within a single
> HTML document?  For example:
> 
> ......
> 
> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=big-5">
> 
> [Big-5 Chinese texts]
> ......
> 
> Will a HTML 4 compilant browser shows first group of texts in ISO-8859-1
> font, 2nd group of texts in BIG-5 font, and last group of texts in
> EUC-Japanese font, if all necessary fonts are installed and automatic font
> switching is available?

That would be illegal HTML 4.  META...HTTP-Equiv is intended mainly as a hint to
the web servers as to what to put in the real HTTP headers, although the
reality is that most browsers act on it directly (and some will restart the 
document as a result.  In any case, META can only appear in HEAD, and browsers
aren't required to act on it.

Changing character set on the fly would break content negotiation, and in
transit recoding.

The correct way of doing this is to use a character set that can cope with
all the languages used.  This could be one with escape codes to switch
encodings, but the real world of browsers means that it would almost 
certainly have to be UTF-8.  (Any character set used must be able to encode
the characters used for the HTML syntax and tags themselves, so must have
a large subset as ASCII as part of it; if you don't use META to set the
character set, you needn't use the ASCII code points, but if you do, there
must be an identity mapping for ASCII.)
>