Problem :
I am very confused about an error message I'm getting when I try to validate any simple HTML document without the meta encoding like this:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>MyTest</title>
</head>
<body>MyTest</body>
</html>
The W3C validator http://validator.w3.org reluctantly accepts a document as valid with just a few warnings when it is pasted into a direct input form, but when the document is uploaded or loaded by the URI, validation fails with below error message
The character encoding was not declared. Proceeding using windows-1252.
There are two things I don't understand about above error:
· Why is the missing character encoding considered an error, when fallback rules exist?
· Why is a validator assuming windows-1252 instead of UTF-8, like any browser would?
Can someone explain me these two points please? I am pretty new to this stuff, so please bear with me.