Question

I already searched for a while, and I failed to find any references on whether it is safe/possible to remove the space here:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;this spacecharset=UTF-8" />

I also tried compressing the script on ‘Aggressive Minimization’, but they don’t seem to remove it.

I see that they removed the space on this website example. But I can’t rely on that kind of websites any more.

Answer 1

The specification of media types, RFC 2045, does not require a space. Neither does it prohibit a space; this is more implicit, since RFC 2045 refers to the extended BNF as defined in RFC 822, which clarifies this in clause 3.4.2. WHITE SPACE:

“Note: In structured field bodies, multiple linear space ASCII
characters (namely HTABs and SPACEs) are treated as
single spaces and may freely surround any symbol. In
all header fields, the only place in which at least one
LWSP-char is REQUIRED is at the beginning of continuation lines in a folded field.”

According to HTML5 drafts, the specific kind of meta tags under discussion can be written in the following more compact form, on the grounds that user agents have long recognized it:

<meta charset=UTF-8>

If XHTML serialization is needed, use

<meta charset="UTF-8" />

This is more readable and safer (fewer possibilities of mistyping when you type it by hand).