Hello, David!


>> Hmm yes, this seems redundant in a way.
>> However, I am strongly convinced that the reason to introduce the
>> HTML attribute was to give authors a "syntactically cleaner" way to
>> specify their character encoding.
>>
>
> I would say there were a couple of reasons:
>
> 1) documents may be served by protocols, e.g. direct file access,  
> which
> do not carry character set metadata.
>
> 2) most people learn HTML on servers where the ability to configure  
> the
> server is blocked for commercial, or, maybe, security reasons. [?]
>

Sorry ? my comment was indeed a bit ambiguous. Allow me to clarify.

James was wondering why (in HTML) there is a separate "charset"  
attribute:

 > [script type="text/foo" charset="UTF-8" src="ext.js"][/script]

while according to his interpretation, RFC 2046 (hence, also HTML  
4.01) seems to literally *demand* instead:

 > [script type="text/foo; charset=UTF-8" src="ext.js"][/script]


Responding to that, I was trying to say:
I am convinced both are semantically equivalent, and it seems to me  
that the HTML working group introduced the former variant just as a  
"cleaner" way of expressing the latter.

Of course, you are right with what you wrote about protocol header  
attributes. Sorry again.


Regards,
Claudio Pellegrino