threads / discuss / 9085

Character set for the HTML documentation

Subject: Character set for the HTML documentation

## tl;dr

3 messages between Jul 17, 2007 and Jul 18, 2007.

replies: 2people: 3as markdown or json

H. Peter Anvin· Jul 17, 2007, 23:31 UTC · lore

I just got the following email:

Show 11 quoted lines

> The Git documentation at
> <http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/user-manual.html> is
> encoded in ISO 8859-1, but it is being served with a content-type header
> of "text/plain; charset=UTF-8".
> 
> The content-type header overrides the value declared in the <meta> tag
> of the HTML document, so this causes browsers to render the
> documentation incorrectly.
> 
> Apologies if this is a well known issue and you get a lot of mail like
> this BTW, just don't LART me too hard. ;)

The fact that browsers behave this way is of course a bug, but it's a common one. Can we switch the documentation over to UTF-8, this is 2007 after all...?

	-hpa

Junio C Hamano· Jul 18, 2007, 02:02 UTC · re: H. Peter Anvin · lore

Re: Character set for the HTML documentation

"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com> writes:

> Can we switch the documentation over to UTF-8, this is 2007
> after all...?

By all means, yes.

I do not think we particularly wanted to use 8859-1, but nothing in Documentation/ tells the asciidoc toolchain that the document should come out in UTF-8 either.

Geoff Richards· Jul 18, 2007, 05:26 UTC · re: H. Peter Anvin · lore

Re: Character set for the HTML documentation

On Tue, Jul 17, 2007 at 04:31:55PM -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:

Show 17 quoted lines

> I just got the following email:
> 
> > The Git documentation at
> > <http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/user-manual.html> is
> > encoded in ISO 8859-1, but it is being served with a content-type header
> > of "text/plain; charset=UTF-8".
> > 
> > The content-type header overrides the value declared in the <meta> tag
> > of the HTML document, so this causes browsers to render the
> > documentation incorrectly.
> > 
> > Apologies if this is a well known issue and you get a lot of mail like
> > this BTW, just don't LART me too hard. ;)
> 
> The fact that browsers behave this way is of course a bug, but it's a
> common one.  Can we switch the documentation over to UTF-8, this is 2007
> after all...?

Unfortunately, it's not a bug. The correct thing for a browser to do is give the 'Content-Type' HTTP header priority over the <meta> element. It's defined in an RFC somewhere.

Best thing to do is tell Apache (or whatever) not to send the HTTP header ("AddDefaultCharset off"), and make sure all the HTML has a correct <meta> element specifying the encoding.

And yes, putting everything in UTF-8 unless you've got a specific reason not to is probably going to make life simpler as well.

HTH,
   geoff