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Re: lynx-dev Incorrect content-type-headers

From: David Woolley
Subject: Re: lynx-dev Incorrect content-type-headers
Date: Fri, 19 Jun 1998 08:12:40 +0100 (BST) 
> i found the same thing with 2-8pre.2, but  <head>  does say  text/html :
> 
> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML//EN">

This is body not head.

> <html>
> 
> <head>
> <title>Internet/Etusivu 12.1.98 [ETUSIVU]</title>
> <meta http-equiv=3D"Content-Type" content=3D"text/html; charset=3DISO-885=
> 9-1">

This is a Microsoftism, although they have got it into the standard.  In this
case it doesn't really help though, as the only real purpose is to allow the
setting of Windows code page character sets on cheap and free server space
where you can't properly control the HTTP headers.  If you don't know that
it is HTML, you cannot legitimately parse this line (even though one of the
longstanding points of contention with MSIE is that it largely ignores the
real headers and treats sample HTML sent as plain text as though it were
not a sample).

This will break with Netscape (and probably every other non-MSIE browser),
as they implement HTTP correctly.

The W3C position on this use of META is that it is an instruction to the
server to set the correct HTTP header, not an instruction to the browser,
and even then, the server needs to at least know that it is dealing with
HTML.

The most likely problem is the use of Hyper Text Markup, rather than 
Hyper Text Markup Language on a server which only recognizes the full
extension.
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