Wrong MIME type and Character Encoding Served

[Alba Ra]

Hello,

I admit I’n not sure about which forum to post my question to.

Anyway, here’a my "problem" - not as much a problem (as my website is served alright) but it bugs me.

My website (www.rosebrossut.fr) was created in XHTML and with character encoding ASCII.

In the meta tags both the mime-type and character encoding is declared accordingly (application/xhtml+xml and us-ascii) but when I look in Firefox both are identified as text/html and windows-1252, respectively. Trying to validate the code using Validator.nu yields the same result and thus any XML markup and the subsequent us-ascii declaration results in a fatal error message.

I tried two ways of forcing the correct mime declaration (not convinced by those myself) but without any success.

1st idea: adding header('Content-type: application/xhtml+xml'); as first line to my PHP code.
2nd idea: adding AddType application/xhtml+xml .php to my .htaccess file.

Can anyone explain this behaviour and (even better) give me an idea to solve this issue, please!?

Thank you very much!

[rtrethewey]

us-ascii and windows-1252 are largely identical and so the tools you've tried may just be substituting someone's prferred choice for labeling the charset identifier. The document MIME-type doesn't (directly) affect the character encoding for HTML/XHTML documents, so neither of the two ideas you posted would have any effect.

When I ran your page through the W3C validator it complained because you had non-ASCII characters in the comments at the end of the document. So my advice would be to try changing the <meta> 'http-equiv' to 'charset=utf-8', which I think may be your best choice in the long run.

[Alba Ra]

Thanks for responding.

Largely identical is not exactly identical. Validator.nu breaks off the validation because Fatal Error: Changing encoding at this point would need non-streamable behavior.

Changing character encoding is a way to get around the problem but does not solve the problem. The W3C Validator does not seem to have the problem.

I prefer to keep us-ascii to better control the character display (i.e. I would have to mix UTF characters and HTML entities because I want specific spaces and other similar non-visual characters, else how to input   in UTF). This way a validator would tell me when I missed a character (i.e. à instead of à).

Unrelated though possibly connected remains the issue why the output is text/html and not application/xhtml+xml. (Yes, it will not affect the character encoding but both issue affect the validation process.)

[Alba Ra]

Okay, one issue solved - or rather: it was not an issue at all.

Added header('Content-type: application/xhtml+xml'); as first line of the PHP file will produce the right mime type! (I use Aptana3 for some of the work and I managed to edit the local file instead of the file on the server. Stupidity is a bug that DaniWeb will have difficulty solving, right?)

Remains the character encoding…