Forum OpenACS Development: Wrong encoding settings in oacs-5-3

There is a bug concerning charsets popping though in oacs-5-3 (not in head). The site-master.tcl sets via

    "text/html; charset=[ad_conn charset]"

the value of <meta http-equiv="content-type" ...> to text/html followed by the charset returned by ad_conn charset. ad_conn gets initialized with the mime_charset of ad_locales

select locale,mime_charset from ad_locales;
->
locale |  mime_charset
--------+-----------------
 en_US  | ISO-8859-1
...

via ad_conn -set charset [lang::util::charset_for_locale [ad_conn locale]].

So, for the locale en_US, it uses always the charset ISO-8859-1 and ignores the value of aolserver config value OutputCharset. Since the OutputCharset is used in the HTTP headers, there is a mismatch in cases, where OutputCharset differs from the settings in the locale table. The W3C validator flags this as an error.

As quick fix I have have changed in oacs-5-3 the settings of http-equiv to

    "text/html; charset=[ns_config ns/parameters OutputCharset [ad_conn charset]]"

which does the trick. Most probably, one should not set this meta-field at all (not sure, why it was put in), and should discourage the use of ad_conn charset to determine the charset settings of the connection.