Bug#62700: charset should be specified before TITLE
Package: www.debian.org
Version: current
The order of tags found in translated (as well as English) pages is
(This one is from <URL:http://www.debian.org/index.ru.html> - KOI8-R
encoding transliterated here for this mail):
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Debian GNU/Linux -- Universal'naya Operacionnaya Sistema</TITLE>
<LINK REV="made" HREF="mailto:webmaster@debian.org";>
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=koi8-r">
.....
The META tag specifying the charset should appear *before* any text that
needs this information in order to be correctly decoded - here: the
TITLE element's content.
This would help browsers that do a one-pass through the document and
don't apply the charset info retroactively - specifically, lynx.
I haven't checked what other browsers do, but expect them to also be
helped by a different order. It's more logical, after all.
Much better yet would be: put the charset info *where it belongs*,
in the HTTP header, instead of relying on HTTP-EQUIV.
Klaus
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