Re: well-formedness error

[Mark Pilgrim <pilgrim@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 15:20:34 +0900, Martin Duerst <duerst@xxxxxx> wrote:
> Of course, for text/html, this has been superseeded by the HTML 4.0
> spec, which essentially says that text/html behaves similarly to
> application/xml, with the encoding pseudo-attribute replaced by
> the <meta> statement. And this is what all major browsers actually
> implement.

Actually, the HTML spec doesn't say that at all.  What it says is that
HTTP *servers* as supposed to introspect into the HTML documents they
serve, pull out http-equiv META tags, and create actual
RFC-822-compliant HTTP headers out of them.

"""The http-equiv attribute can be used in place of the name attribute
and has a special significance when documents are retrieved via the
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). HTTP servers may use the property
name specified by the http-equiv attribute to create an [RFC822]-style
header in the HTTP response."""

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#adef-http-equiv

I know of no server that does this.  I *do* agree that every major
browser misuses the http-equiv META tag to *override* the HTTP headers
sent by the server.  This behavior is not supported by spec text; it's
just one of a myriad of undocumented things that "everybody does" in
the browser world.

-- 
Cheers,
-Mark