[Bug 228988] Re: Firefox can display a page with the wrong encoding

[ThiloPfennig]

Although Andre was spamming I have to agree with the basic message. What
Firefox is doing is that it uses UTF-8 as default for ANY web page,
which is false. As in Germany many pages use ISO-8859-1 and many HTML
pages do not specify an encoding. To start with the first example
mentioned in the bug report if I access the page:
http://atilf.atilf.fr/tlf.htm Firefox sets encoding to UTF-8.

I have read a bit more documents. The primary problem here is that too
many pages on the web do not declare a character set.

 Secondly HTTP clearly defines that ISO-8859-1 is a falllback character
set: " When no explicit charset  parameter is provided by the sender,
media subtypes of the "text"  type are defined to have a default charset
value of "ISO-8859-1" when  received via HTTP."
(http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-3.7.1 , RFC 2616  ). This
had been the default character set for ages. So one can assume that if
pages or servers do not send a character set, that they are old (HTML
2,3,...) where there was not even an alternative.

-- 
Firefox can display a page with the wrong encoding
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/228988
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