Re: UTF-8 output

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

John Fleck wrote:

> On Thu, 2002-11-14 at 23:55, James Henstridge wrote:
>  
>
> > jrb pointed this issue out on IRC.  If you look at the documentation at:
> >    http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/glib/index.html
> >
> > You will notice that it doesn't display the "Next >>>" link correctly 
> > (there is a little bit of garbage between "Next" and ">>>").
> >
> > I investigated this problem, and it is because mozilla is interpreting 
> > the web page as being Latin1, while it is actually UTF-8 encoded (the 
> > garbage is the UTF-8 representation of a non-breaking space).  This 
> > seems to be due to a conflict between the headers sent by the web 
> > server, and the <meta> tag in the page itself:
> >
> >    Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
> >    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
> >
> > The http headers take precedence, and disables the browser's encoding 
> > detection routines.  
> >    
>
> So am I understanding correctly here - the web server is ignoring the
> actual encoding of the document (UTF-8 in this case) and automatically
> informing the browser it's "charset=ISO-8859-1" no matter what it is?
>  
If apache is configured with the "AddDefaultCharset" option, then it 
will add a charset option to the content type header for text/html 
documents, which will override any document specified charset (or one 
determined via heuristics).

Apparently an AddDefaultCharset directive was added to the default 
config file distributed with apache, as the automatic charset detection 
can apparently open up some cross site scripting problems in some 
situations (widget.gnome.org is configured this way, for instance).

In this particular case though, it is simply causing the web server to 
pick the wrong charset.

Getting gtkdoc to output HTML encoded as ISO-8859-1 or US-ASCII (all 
other characters encoded as character references) would work around this 
common web server configuration.

James.

--
Email: james daa com au              | Linux.conf.au   http://linux.conf.au/
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/ | Jan 22-25   Perth, Western Australia.