Behaviour of IE5 (was Re: IE5.0 does not conform to RFC2376)

[Rick Jelliffe]

From: MURATA Makoto <murata at apsdc.ksp.fujixerox.co.jp>

>However, IE 5.0 appears to always ignore the charset parameter and use
>the BOM or encoding declaration only.  Therefore, IE 5.0 does not
conform to
>RFC 2376.

In the IE5 beta, that there *seemed* to be two related matters: the
first was which encoding the document is used to read into IE5, and the
second was which encoding is used to drive the fonts. In the beta, the
former seemed to work, and it was the latter which was not reliable (it
was quite sticky, and seemed to use autodetection rather than the
markup--if you had looked at a Turkish file, then GB detection didnt
work, for example). This seems to have been fixed now.

Our test files show that IE5 always looks for the encoding header when
finding which content type to select: even if you send an XML document
with an MIME content type as text/plain and an extension .txt, IE5
imports it as XML.

Tim commented that &lt;? handling is still not correct. This is a
problem they have known about for a few months. I had email with someone
from Microsoft about it, and he suggested that if I wanted to use CSS, I
should double delimit my data! Given that delimiting output strings is
the first thing everyone finds out about text processing, and given that
it typically takes a paragraph of code, and given that Microsoft have
known about this for a while, I don't think we should treat this as a
bug but an engineering decision by Microsoft; I wouldn't like to imagine
the purpose.

But Microsoft's Chinese support (in the Eglish version on an English OS)
is great. Shame about CSS, &lt;  etc. (CSS is a bit better than before,
though.)

Rick


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