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Comment from the i18n review of: http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-html-polyglot-20100624/ Comment 2 At http://www.w3.org/International/reviews/1007-polyglot/ Editorial/substantive: S Tracked by: RI Location in reviewed document: 3. Character Encoding [http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-html-polyglot-20100624/#character-encoding] Comment: "In addition, polyglot markup need not include the meta charset declaration, because the parser would have to read UTF-16 in order to parse it by definition." The i18n WG guidelines recommend, nevertheless, that you always include a visible encoding declaration in your document, since it helps developers, testers, or translation production managers who want to visually check the encoding of a document. So it's true to say that you strictly don't need it, but we would prefer that people do. Please could you reflect that in your document.
The 27 September editor's draft contains the following changes: Section 3 now reads: ************************** 3. Specifying a Document's Character Encoding Polyglot markup uses either UTF-8 or UTF-16. UTF-8 is preferred. When polyglot markup uses UTF-16, it must include the BOM indicating UTF-16LE or UTF-16BE. Polyglot markup declares character encoding one of two ways: By using the BOM. In the HTTP header of the response [HTTP11], as in the following: Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8 or Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-16 Note that polyglot markup may use either text/html or application/xhtml+xml for the value of the content type. Using <meta charset="*"/> has no effect in XML. Therefore, polyglot markup may use <meta charset="*"/> in combination with BOM, as long the meta element specifies the same character encoding as the BOM. In addition, the meta tag may be used in the absence of a BOM as long as it matches the already specified encoding. Note that the W3C Internationalization (i18n) Group recommends to always include a visible encoding declaration in a document, because it helps developers, testers, or translation production managers to check the encoding of a document visually. ************************** I believe that this satisfies the request in this bug. thank you for your patience.