Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 05/04/06 13:16

On Thu, 4 May 2006, ironcorona wrote:

> Toby Inkster wrote:
> > A character encoding most be declared for the validator, but you
> > don't need to use a META element to do so.
>
> Perhaps. It's quite new to me so when I didn't have one I followed
> the link it showed:
> http://validator.w3.org/docs/help.html#faq-charset

Indeed:

| Specifying a character encoding is normally done in the web server
| configuration file [...]

> I followed this about and it suggested the meta tag.

I'm not sure how you managed to read that into it!

meta http-equiv is *only* relevant to HTML (and consequently to
Appendix-C XHTML/1.0 being offered as text/html, since that is meant
to be handled as error-fuxup-ed HTML).

It has no meaning for XHTML-properly-so-called.

It's a workaround which can be used (for HTML, not XHTML) for
protocols (such as file: or ftp:) which do not include a mechanism for
carrying a character encoding specification (MIME charset) in the
protocol. But for HTTP, the better place to deal with this is in the
HTTP header, just as the W3C FAQ says - by suitably configuring the
server.

The cited WDG tutorial (which is primarily addressing HTML, not XHTML)
says the same:

|An HTML document must specify its character encoding. The preferred
|method of indicating the encoding is by using the charset parameter
|of the Content-Type HTTP header.

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