The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5)

Headers and charsets

Great article on charsets etc.

But why is this this that the article has Content-Type *after* things like title ?

It is not the case in the first brazilian article as you can see.
Was there a change between 2.0.18 and 2.0.20 ? Or isn't the whole site generated from the same file ?

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<HTML><HEAD><meta name="generator" content="Fog Creek CityDesk 2.0.20" />
<meta name="citydesk" content="39BE6FF3/614" />
<title>Joel on Software - The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)</TITLE>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<STYLE type=text/css>

----
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<meta name="generator" content="Fog Creek CityDesk 2.0.18" />
<meta name="citydesk" content="B936576A/450" />
<title>Joel on Software - </title>
<style type="text/css">
<!--

Philippe
Saturday, October 11, 2003

The Content-Type Meta tag belongs in the head section as per the xhtml specifications.

You could declare the Content-Type in an xml prolog, but IE doesn't correctly parse xhtml that has a valid xml prolog.

Ankur
Sunday, October 12, 2003

No, no. His point is that it should be the first tag inside HEAD according to Joel's advice, and yet on that exact page, it's the fourth tag inside HEAD.

He has a point. ;)

Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Sunday, October 12, 2003