Wrong default encoding for RSS

Received a nice bug report & suggestions to fix the problem today via mail.

Hi forge friends!

I’m following the updates via: forgefriends

But the HTTP Content-Type tells text/xml without specifying a content type, which according RFC 3023 means US-ASCII, but the body of the document states encoding=utf8.

Here’s ways to fix it:

  • Change the content-type to application/xml which defaults to UTF-8 (not recommended by the RFC : “explicit is better”)
  • Add an explicit encoding to the content-type, like text/xml; charset=utf8
  • Or: application/xml; charset=UTF-8

While I’m here, here’s the section about how to chosse between text/xml and application/xml:

If an XML document that is, the unprocessed, source XML document
is readable by casual users, text/xml is preferable to
application/xml.

Bests,