Elementary Standards HTML Tutorial
The tutorials found herein have been written for clarification of existing W3C HTML 5 and HTML 4.01 (and, by extension, xHTML 1.0 as text/html) specifications through the use of real-world examples.
http-equiv
The http-equiv or, HyperText Transfer Protocol Equivalent, attribute becomes an implementation- specific directive—when used with the meta element—for HTTP servers to gather information that may be used for expected rendering of the document, i.e., web page. It may be found assigned with the meta element.
- Attribute name:
http-equiv- Value:
- Name
- Example [Basic]:
- Code [HTML]:
-
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset="utf-8"> - Code [xHTML]:
-
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset="utf-8" />
- Example [Common (Meta Directions Ignored)]:
-
The document has stated
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset="Shift_JIS">However, the server has a Character Encoding setting of
<charset="utf-8">which means that the server setting has precedence over and ignores the document directive. It will render the page with
utf-8. - Test Case | W3C Results
- See Elementary Test Case.
- W3C Validation results returned the following warning that illustrates how User Agents process mismatched directives.
-
Character Encoding mismatch!The character encoding specified in the HTTP header (
utf-8) is different from the value in the<meta>element (shift_jis). I will use the value from the HTTP header (utf-8) for this validation.
The Elementary Standards: A Compendium of articles, tutorials and reference material regarding Web Standards, HTML and CSS Copyright ©2005-2010. All work is published by Sean Fraser under a Creative Commons License. All Rights Reserved.