Question on Accept-Charset

I have a question on how to treat ISO 8859-1 in
Accept-Charset and didn't find it discussed in the
archives. 

> 14.2 Accept-Charset

> The ISO-8859-1 character set can be assumed to be
> acceptable to all user agents.
>
>        Accept-Charset = "Accept-Charset" ":"
>                  1#( ( charset | "*" [ ";" "q" "=" qvalue ]
> )
>
> Character set values are described in section 3.4. Each
> charset may be given an associated quality value which
> represents the user's preference for that charset. The
> default value is q=1. An example is
>
>        Accept-Charset: iso-8859-5, unicode-1-1;q=0.8
>
> The special value "*", if present in the Accept-Charset
> field, matches every character set (including ISO-8859-1)
> which is not mentioned elsewhere in the Accept-Charset
> field.    If no "*" is present in an Accept-Charset field,
> then all character sets not explicitly mentioned get a
> quality value of 0, except for ISO-8859-1, which gets a
> quality value of 1 if not explicitly mentioned.

If a server receives

  Accept-Charset: iso-8859-5, *;q=0

is iso-8859-1 acceptable to the client?  What about:

  Accept-Charset: iso-8859-5, iso-8859-1;q=0

In both cases I would assume it is not acceptable to the
client, but this seems to contradict the first sentence above.
If this is in fact the case, then I think the sentence

> The ISO-8859-1 character set can be assumed to be
> acceptable to all user agents.

should be removed.  Given the last paragraph, which I find
quite clear, this sentence only adds confusion.

Howard

Received on Friday, 21 November 1997 06:00:45 UTC