Re: lynx-dev HTML4.0 and default charset

[David Woolley]

> The most logical way to have servers configured properly :-)
> IMO, charset parameter should be always specified when document
> have characters >128. Unfortunately, http/html specs keep compatibility

Unfortunately this is unrealistic because:

1) Many web server operators don't understand such things (the web
   server is a way to make money/retain customers, not something to
   understand);

2) Most content providers don't understand such things, even when they
   do have access to meta data (after all, it works on their GUI
   browser);

3) Many, if not most pages, by volume, are on some sort of "free" space
   where users have no access to meta data;

4) Although META headers are supposed to control the server, I have 
   seen little evidence of this, and a lot of evidence that they
   are controlling the browser instead - in any case a variation of
   item 2 applies, as these are normally set to the Windows Western
   European proprietory character set, by the authoring tools, even
   if ASCII or ISO 8859/1 would have been sufficient (I presume
   Japanese versions of Front Page use a different default).

> with very old browsers which does not understand charset parameter
> and even can not ignore it (and such browsers are obviously broken

Such browsers, apart from HTTP 0.9 browsers, have always been broken.

> for any modern HTML in any case). That is the root of the problem.

You are shooting yourself in the foot here; most content providers would
probably define modern browsers as NS 4.x or IE 4/5 with JavaScript,
Java and probably Win32 ActiveX turned on.  They certainly wouldn't
include Lynx; Lynx survives at all because some people follow the spirit
of HTML and write universal HTML.