From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Mon Aug 08 2005 - 11:22:58 CDT
On Mon, 8 Aug 2005, Tom Gewecke wrote:
> Recently I came across a web site with the declared charset "BIGFIVE_TO_UTF"
>
> http://cis.ntl.edu.tw/
There is no such charset defined, of course. It sounds like a misguided
attempt at giving the browser the completely unnecessary information about
how the server transcoded the document before sending it, resulting in a
failure to declare the encoding at all. (The <meta> tag specifies the
above-mentioned charset, and the HTTP headers specify none.)
> Apparently Win IE can display this page correctly, but no other browser
> will.
Opera seems to display the page well. The strange thing is that this
happens even when the default encoding is not UTF-8. This is explained,
and another puzzle is created, when I use View Source on Opera or IE:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
Thus, my guess is that the server for some reason sends garbage to
Firefox. Probably Chinese characters were converted in some wrong way.
In the markup it has
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html;
charset=BIGFIVE_TO_UTF">
Firefox seems to send
Accept-Charset: ???,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
in the HTTP headers, where ??? is the encoding set as default. (This is
rather illogical; my preference for an encoding to be tried when a page
fails to specify its encoding is logically quite independent of my
preferences on the encoding of a page, in cases where a page exists in
differently encoded forms.)
Opera seems to send (when running on Windows XP)
Accept-Charset: windows-1252, utf-8, utf-16, iso-8859-1;q=0.6, *;q=0.1
And IE seems to send no Accept-Charset header.
Thus, the presence of utf-8 with a quality number of 0.7 might have an
effect in the case. But if I change the default encoding in Firefox to
UTF-8, then it starts sending
Accept-Charset: utf-8,*
and the problem still remains.
-- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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