Re: Accept-Charset support

# If there is a need for a client to express "I can understand UTF-8,
# but can only display some of the 10646 characters: ..." - and I 
# definitely think there is such a need - I don not see a way to implement
# this cleanly.

I think this kind of communication is along the same lines as: "I can
implement all of HTML 3.5 tables, except I don't know anything about
the 'border' parameter".

That is, there may be a need to communicate special subset
capabilities, but usually those limitations are transient and too
fine-grained to actually matter in real communication.

In general, in the web, we've avoided catering to fine-grained
differentiation of client capabilities. Yes, you can say "I speak
postscript" or not, but there's no good way to say "I can take
postscript files but don't give me any that won't look good on little
pieces of paper".

There _is_ a proposal for allowing profiles of capabilities to be
expressed and negotiated, and the proposal is elaborated in internet
drafts:
	draft-holtman-http-negotiation-04.txt
	draft-ietf-http-feature-reg-00.txt
and related topics in:
	draft-mutz-http-attributes-02.txt
	draft-goland-http-headers-00.txt
from your nearby internet drafts directory. Perhaps 'support for
particular subsets of ISO-10646' might fit into this category.

Larry

Received on Saturday, 7 December 1996 13:43:07 UTC