Re: Accept-Charset support

Larry Masinter wrote:
> # That implies that sending
> # 	Accept-Charset: utf-8
> # Should generate a 406 response if the document is only available in, say,
> # Latin-1 and the server cannot convert that to UTF-8.
> 
> I think Latin-1 is a special case. From
> draft-ietf-http-v11-spec-07.txt:
> 
> # The ISO-8859-1 character set can be assumed to be acceptable to all
> # user agents.

Come on, that was political compromise. ISO 8859-5 terminal can't
represent iso-8859-1 with q=1.0. User agent can do necessary translations,
but what actually gets displayed is not the same as on ISO 8859-1
terminal.

> 
> I think the simple thing to do is to send:
> 
> 	accept-charset: utf-8,iso-8859-5
> 
> if you're a browser and can display utf-8 and 8859-5 as well as
> 8859-1.  If you're a search service or willing to load things to local
> disk, then you can put a * at the end:
> 
> accept-charset: utf-8,iso-8859-5,*

HTTP 1.1 v7 does not specify * as a special value. Section 3.4 says:

   HTTP character sets are identified by case-insensitive tokens. The
   complete set of tokens is defined by the IANA Character Set registry
   [19].

          charset = token

Section 14.2 defines header syntax:

 Accept-Charset = "Accept-Charset" ":"
		  1#( charset [ ";" "q" "=" qvalue ] )

and doesn't mention * at all. It is not an error to send *, but the spec
doesn't say it has special meaning. Unless it's defined in IANA registry,
which I doubt very much.

-- 
Life is a sexually transmitted disease.

dave@fly.cc.fer.hr
dave@zemris.fer.hr