Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2000 11:20:49 -0600 From: Mike Brown <mbrown@corp.webb.net> To: "'freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG'" <freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: autodection of encoding vs freebsd.org's docs Message-ID: <8D96EDA0AC04D31197B400A0C96C1480F705BE@ossex1.ossinc.net>
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I have my browser (IE 5.0) set to autodetect encodings of documents, which seems like a sensible thing to do. The HTML documents on the freebsd.org site tend to fail to have any encoding declarations in the HTTP headers (Content-Type: text/html;charset=foo) or in the document HEAD (<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=foo">). Therefore, the browser falls back on its autodetection mechanism, which usually assumes ISO 8859-1 but sometimes decides the document is UTF-7 encoded. It picks UTF-7 if the document contains something that looks like a Modified Base64 sequence as per RFC 2152. The sequence is delimited by "+" and "-" and contains characters from the Base64 alphabet. The browser is not misbehaving in this situation; I think it is reasonable to assume UTF-7 when such sequences are found and no other information is available. An example of such a page is http://www.freebsd.org/ports/www.html which contains things like "apache+ipv6-1.3.11". I suggest either declaring the actual encodings in the documents or configuring the web server to send charset information in the response headers. - Mike ___________________________________________________________ Mike J. Brown, software engineer, Webb Interactive Services XML/XSL stuff: http://www.skew.org/ http://www.webb.net/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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