Re: SHOULD we include charset=ISO-8859-1?

# 1. Could the person who wrote "... when it is known that it will not
# confuse the recipient." please explain the circumstances under which
# a recipient may be confused as a result of the sender including a
# charset parameter.

At the time the sentence was written, there were some popular
web browsers that were confused when there was an explicit
charset parameter.

To answer the contrapositive of your questionm it is known that it
will NOT confuse the recipient when:
  a) you know you're not talking to one of those browsers
     (e.g., you've done a survey and the user-agent string
      is a version that is known to deal with explicit
      charset parameters)
  b) such browsers are so infrequently used on the internet
      that you don't care.

We hope condition (b) will happen soon. In any case, the short answer
to "SHOULD we include charset=ISO-8859-1" is "yes".

Larry

Received on Tuesday, 18 February 1997 20:40:38 UTC