Re: URI without file extension

Helmut Richter wrote:


The first decision of the server admin is what the server should do if the author has not taken any provision to specify the charset. My current
opinion (but that may change from day to day during these discussions due
to new insight) is that it should send the Content-Type header without
charset. This has the side-effect that a meta tag, if provided by the
author, will work as intended.

Seeking for a meta http-equiv="Content-Type" tag inside the HTML document is not a bad idea, and is even suggested by the HTML 4.01 standard:

Section 7.4.4 of HTML 4.01 standard makes a strange statement (without MUST/MAY/SHOULD keyword) about the http-equiv attribute:

| HTTP servers use this attribute to gather
| information for HTTP response message headers.

Then, a more correct paragraph specifies what servers *may* do:

| The http-equiv attribute can be used in place of the name attribute
| and has a special significance when documents are retrieved via
| the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). HTTP servers may use the
| property name specified by the http-equiv attribute to create an
| [RFC822]-style header in the HTTP response. Please see the HTTP
| specification ([RFC2616]) for details on valid HTTP headers.

One of the advantage of servers that serve the Content-Type specified by the meta tag, is that, HTML unaware (but aware of text and charsets) HTTP clients will benefit from it.
e.g.: non-HTML HTTP download managers.

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