- From: Drazen Kacar <Drazen.Kacar@public.srce.hr>
- Date: Fri, 6 Dec 1996 00:42:37 +0100 (MET)
- To: masinter@parc.xerox.com (Larry Masinter)
- Cc: Chris.Lilley@sophia.inria.fr, mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch, www-international@w3.org, Alan_Barrett/DUB/Lotus.LOTUSINT@crd.lotus.com, bobj@netscape.com, wjs@netscape.com, erik@netscape.com, Ed_Batutis/CAM/Lotus@crd.lotus.com
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
Received on Thursday, 5 December 1996 18:45:49 UTC