innerHTML = responseText generates invalid chars

[Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn]

“There’s just no nice way to say this…â€
© 2004 Tim Bray

Thanks for quoting me. You may want to read
<http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-starttags> and
<http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-sgml-xml-971215#null3>.


PointedEars

 

[Eric B. Bednarz]

Thanks for quoting me.

You are welcome.

You may want to read

<http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-starttags> and
<http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-sgml-xml-971215#null3>.

Well you certainly found something to read; now all you need is to find
somebody who can explain it to you.

--
“As you can observe in the specification, all HTML elements with an
empty content model, including the `br', `img' and `meta' elements, have
an *optional* end tag. That goes for HTML 3.2, HTML 4.01 Transitional,
Frameset, and Strict, and (so) even ISO HTML.â€
—Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn in c.l.j.

 

[Eric B. Bednarz]

I overlooked this one, but anyway…

In practice, the default character encoding for HTML documents is
ISO-8859-1,

LOL. In *practice*, it's Windows 1252, [and so on]

ISO-8859-1 has always been the (historical) http default character
encoding since the eighties. But you have a point that in practice
there are (quite recent) addings.

My point is not about ‘addings’ to the repertoire. The repertoire has
always been quite complete for more or less normal needs. But you can do
everything by the book, if you don’t have certain characters available,
they won’t show in the first place (CSS reality is even a bit harsher
than that, depending on OS and browser).

But stating that Windows-1252 is the default charset,
would be a bridge too far for me.

When I refer to *in practice*, I mean just that. Windows 1252 encoded
pages (‘documents’ for Mr. Lahn, though he apparently doesn’t even
understand what an SGML document actually is) usually display fine in
the absence of any encoding information, and not only under
windows. Including character references to windows 1252 code points
(instead of the document character set).

That is not to say that you should rely on that. Practice is inherently
empirical.