Web browser character encoding priority
Note: Most people are not affected by this. On Firefox 3 and IE7 I noticed a strange behavior. This isn’t exactly a bug, but it would be wise for web browser designers to look in to. The HTTP character set headers take priority over the HTML meta http-equiv pseudo headers. This is not a good behavior because many amateur web designers don’t understand how to change the server headers that are being sent. If someone is coding their page in ISO-8859-1, they’re probably going to edit their HTML to say charset ISO-8859-1 instead of making an htaccess file that changes the character encoding or make a php script with a header function. If this happens and the server is overriding and saying UTF-8, you’ve got some nice squares filled with hex codes on the page. If a basic user accesses this page, they’re going to blame it on the browser, not the server. It would be one thing if it was entirely the site’s fault, but the fix is simple, and putting the most likely to be updated setting as having priority is not exactly a brutal hack.
Perhaps there is a RFC somewhere that dictates that server messages should be prioritized. In that case, my post is invalid and should be ignored.