- From: Judah Eckenberg <jeckenbe@darkwing.uoregon.edu>
- Date: Thu, 5 Dec 1996 13:35:24 -0800 (PST)
- To: "Martin J. Duerst" <mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch>
- cc: Erik van der Poel <erik@netscape.com>, Alan Barrett/DUB/Lotus <Alan_Barrett/DUB/Lotus.LOTUSINT@crd.lotus.com>, www-international <www-international@w3.org>, bobj <bobj@netscape.com>, wjs <wjs@netscape.com>, Chris Lilley <Chris.Lilley@sophia.inria.fr>, Ed Batutis/CAM /Lotus <Ed_Batutis/CAM/Lotus@crd.lotus.com>
On Thu, 5 Dec 1996, Martin J. Duerst wrote: > On Wed, 4 Dec 1996, Erik van der Poel wrote: > > > > Browser vendors are not keen to send a very long list of character sets > > > accepted due to the overhead. > > > > Right. This is one concern that keeps coming up over here at Netscape. > > > > What do people think about this suggestion? Will it work for servers? I am > > > really keen to give servers a chance to return UTF-8. How do servers today > > > return UTF-8 when Accept-Charset is not generally being sent to them? > > > > Servers cannot send UTF-8 to clients unless they know that the client is > > capable of decoding it or there is a large critical mass of browsers in > > the installed base that is known to be capable of decoding UTF-8. [snipped] > The structure, as I see it, has three levels: > > (1) UTF-8 as an encoding that covers pretty much everything, and that > we want to help getting acceptance. This group migth include > some other encodings of Unicode/ISO 10646, but not too many. > > (2) A list of well used and widely accepted encodings, ideally one for > each "region" of the world. For Western Europe, this is > iso-8859-1. We want servers to send this, and not something > from the next category. > > (3) All the special variants, alternative designations, and garbage > "charset" parameters. [snipped] > So in practice, I could see the following solutions for > Accept-Charset: > > - Send UTF-8 if you can accept it, and nothing else. > > - Send UTF-8 and/or a careful selection of class (2) > "charset"s. > What about the possibility of the browser combining the Accept-Lang and Accept-Charset attributes? The browser could look at the Accept-Lang specifications made by the user and from those derive a list of acceptable character sets. If the user only listed Japanese in the Accept-Lang field, then the browser could specify ISO 2022-JP along with UTF-8 (if capable) in the Accept-Charset. This would help guide the server on what to send and would also keep down the number of Accept-Charset attributes sent. I, as a user, probably don't want to see a page in a language I don't understand, even if my browser can display it. This would be potentially problematical for multilingual documents, but that might be dealt with in the Accept-Lang attribute. Also, does anyone have a list of the HTTPD servers that can do automatic translation? Thanks, Judah _____________________________________________________________________________ Judah Eckenberg Web Master http://babel.uoregon.edu/yamada.html Yamada Language Center University of Oregon
Received on Thursday, 5 December 1996 16:39:59 UTC