Re: [Lynx-dev] Encoding

[David Woolley]

> Lynx does not parse the "encoding" part of the XML tag,
> and neither is there a meta tag "content-type" nor does
> the HTTP response give any hint of the charset type.

What media type was this served with?  If it was served as text/html,
it is actually being served to browsers interpreting it as broken HTML,
and would need the content encoding to be specified using HTML compatible
means to be sort-of-valid.  (It is effectively impossible to serve
a valid document that is both XHTML and HTML compliant, at least
for non-trivial cases.)

If it wasn't served as text/html, it won't work on IE, unless it content
negotiates HTML for IE, in which case, although I don't like it, 
pretend to be IE.  (IE's HTML error recovery may well include recognizing
XML declarations, at least for the encoding - that's probably done without
properly parsing the document, as a pre-pass.)

Most people serve XHTML as text/html for unsound, usually fashion reasons.
A number of respected people in the HTML standards world, including
Ian Hickson of Mozilla and Opera, advise that one should use HTML 4.01
unless one has a sound technical reason (e.g. mixed namespaces) to use
XHTML and one serves it with an XHTML media type (thus excluding IE).