Ubuntu
firefox package

  1. Bug #228988
  2. Comment #21

Comment 21 for bug 228988

Revision history for this message
ThiloPfennig (tpfennig) wrote : Re: Firefox can display a page with the wrong encoding

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.