In SGML definitions of HTML (anything before XHTML 1.0 and "ISO HTML"), that would be an error as well, so I'm not sure what your point is here.
Let me try to explain it so you can understand,
memreflect.
The topic of the Thread is "Firefox is getting more intelligent (than us)".
I followed that up with the second post to this tread with:
I know if you use the right-click option to "View Page Source" in Firefox-ESR it will highlight in red XHTML errors I've made the W3C validator points out that I can't readily see by glancing over the page of markup.
My point was to show how it was getting more intelligent and could identify markup errors in 'View Page Source" option to view the raw XHTML markup I might not readily see.
You followed that up with:
Well, that's certainly interesting. Neither the server nor the HTML declares a character encoding for the document, so nobody can blame Firefox incorrectly guessing it's ISO-8859-2 when you "Repair Text Encoding". In my opinion, the right option would have been to retain the menu and add the new menu item for old pages like this.
Which was an erroneous statement on your part. It
does make a declaration of character encoding of "utf-8' in the xml version declaration preceding the DocType and in the metatag shown in my "View Page Source" screenshot.
Code:
<?xml version='1.1' encoding='utf-8'?>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8" />
You are the one who said it couldn't be blamed for incorrectly guessing ISO-8859-2 as the character encoding. From what exactly did you draw the conclusion from that it incorrectly "guessed" the character encoding?
Are you suggesting that invalid markup is the cause of the character encoding trouble being discussed in this thread?
I purposely deleted the closing bracket of the Title of my index.html page, loaded it in Firefox-ESR as a file and took a screen shot to document the claim I made of the ability of Firefox-ESR to "highlight in red XHTML errors".
Is that clear to you now? All my markup is
valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional, and FYI, my CSS is valid
CSS level 3 + SVG.
You could shorten things to <title>Your title here</><meta ...>
and it would still be valid HTML, but most HTML parsers would have trouble with that and such usage is discouraged by the W3C and the W3C HTML validator anyway. The shortest valid HTML 4.01 Strict document (if you ignore the lack of a doctype) is <title//<p>
.
It would not be valid XHTML (and if it's not valid XHTML it's not considered to be XHTML at all), the validation abilities of which was my addition to the thread topic of how Firefox is getting more intelligent (than us).
For more information about these SGML features that few browsers (if any) have implemented,
SGML - Markup minimization (Wikipedia) and
Understanding HTML and SGML (W3C) are two useful resources. I am glad XML, and consequently XHTML, simplified things significantly with crazy features like those!
For a more information in the differences in
XHTML Versus HTML.