ISSUE-204: Problem of UTF-8 only

Problem of UTF-8 only

State:

CLOSED

Product:

mobileOK Basic tests

Raised by:

Jonathan Jeon

Opened on:

2007-07-19

Description:

3.3 CHARACTER_ENCODING_SUPPORT and CHARACTER_ENCODING_USE

The DDC is defined to support only UTF-8 encoding, which means that this test fails if a resource cannot be encoded in UTF-8. It is reasonable to recommend that default character encoding should use UTF-8. But it is not good that all of another character encoding except UTF-8 should be FAIL.

In many cases, if some country does not use English as a native language, they are using various character encoding schemes. For example, EUC is a multibyte character encoding system used primarily for Japanese, Korean, and simplified Chinese. The EUC-KR and EUC-JP(ISO-2022) encoding is heavily used in Korea and Japan. [1]

UTF-8 is not widely used in Korea. EUC-KR is more popular character encoding scheme in Korea (maybe more than 90% of Wired and Mobile web contents). It is the most widely used legacy character encoding in Korea on all three major platforms. Therefore, if we support only UTF-8, more than 90% of sites and contents will be ‘FAIL’.

So, it is proposed to consider additional character encodings. It is proposed to modify the section 3.3 as below:

PROPOSED TEXT:
------------------------
If the HTTP Content-Type header specifies a character encoding:
If character encoding is default-character-encoding, PASS
If character encoding is not default-character-encoding, warn
If the HTTP Content-Type header does not specify a character encoding:
If there is no XML declaration, or default character encoding or any character encoding is not specified in the XML declaration, FAIL
If the HTTP Content-Type header specifies an Internet media type starting with "text/":
If there is no meta element with http-equiv attribute that specifies default character encoding or any character encoding, FAIL
If character encoding is specified in more than one way, and not all values are the same, FAIL
If the document is not valid default character encoding or any character encoding (see 2.3.9 Validity), FAIL
For each resource specified by 2.3.6 Included Resources:
Request the resource
If the HTTP Content-Type header value of the response starts with "text/" but does not specify default character encoding or any character encoding character encoding, warn
PASS
------------------------

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/member-bpwg/2007Jul/0047.html

Related Actions Items:

No related actions

Related emails:

1. [minutes] F2F Meeting Day 2 - 6 November 2007 (TPAC) (from dom@w3.org on 2007-11-12)
2. Converted ISSUE-204, ISSUE-205, ISSUE-206 to a last call comment (from srowen@google.com on 2007-07-19)
3. Re: ISSUE-204: Problem of UTF-8 only [mobileOK Basic tests] (from srowen@google.com on 2007-07-19)
4. RE: ISSUE-204: Problem of UTF-8 only [mobileOK Basic tests] (from hollobit@etri.re.kr on 2007-07-19)
5. Re: ISSUE-204: Problem of UTF-8 only [mobileOK Basic tests] (from srowen@google.com on 2007-07-19)
6. ISSUE-204: Problem of UTF-8 only [mobileOK Basic tests] (from sysbot+tracker@w3.org on 2007-07-19)

Related notes:

Display change log