Character set for libstdc++ manual

Sun Jun 10 10:44:00 GMT 2012

[ Adding our libstdc++ list ]

On Fri, 13 Apr 2012, Martin von Gagern wrote:
> While browsing http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/ using Firefox, I
> noticed some mojibake due to the fact that the page was interpreted as
> iso-8859-15, my default charset, while it is actually meant to be utf-8.
> The server does not add a charset parameter to its content-type header.
> Neither does the document contain a corresponding meta tag. The document
> does contain an xml header, but as the document is shipped as text/html,
> not application/xhtml+xml, I believe the browser is correct to ignore that.

I looked into this, and believe the issue we do want to tackle is
the HTML pages generated for libstdc++.

For example, looking at libstdc++/doc/html/manual/index.html, at the
end of the file we have

  <td align="center">\xc2\xa0</td><td align="right">\xc2\xa0...
  ...The GNU C++ Library\xc2\xa0</td>

where I believe \xc2\xa0 is Unicode non-breaking space.  Wouldn't it
be better to issue HTML   instead?

Alternately, you could add
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
to the <head>...</head> section of the libstdc++ pages.

Gerald