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.
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.