- From: BearHeart / Bill Weinman <bearheart@bearnet.com>
- Date: Sun, 28 Jan 1996 17:33:48 -0600
- To: Francois Yergeau <yergeau@alis.ca>, http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
At 03:32 pm 1/28/96 -0500, Francois Yergeau spake: > "http://www.alis.com/~Fran=E7ois"=20 Hmmm... I got this: 404 Pas trouv=E9 L'URL demand=E9 /~Fran=E7ois est introuvable sur ce serveur. But I seem to be getting the c-cedilla okay.=20 What character set is it expecting?=20 >Personally, I like the implicit UTF-8 idea: any non-ASCII character >must be sent to a server as its UTF-8 encoding, either URL-encoded That leaves out a large segment of the world. Frankly, I don't=20 think we can get very far with any 8-bit system. Even if we discount=20 the languages with more than 100 or so characters, we're still stuck=20 once we try to handle more than two or three--greek, cyrillic,=20 semitic/arabic, english--too many characters already.=20 ---=20 SUGGESTION FOR HANDLING HTTP REQUESTS ONLY:=20 How about an optional single-octet, represented in decimal ascii,=20 that specifies a character-set. Register a number of them with IANA,=20 and then it's up to the server to be able to interpret those that=20 are applicable to the services it handles locally.=20 If there is no octet specified, the server defaults to 7-bit=20 ascii.=20 The ordinal value of the octet could be loosely-tied to the=20 numeric country codes already in use for a number of other purposes.=20 So, if the first field of a request is numeric, e.g.:=20 033 GET /~Fran=E7ois HTTP/1.1 The server knows that this request is using character-set=20 number "33", which would of course have a common representation=20 for c-cedilla, and voil=E0! everyone knows who's saying what! --- BTW, the mail header to your message had this:=20 Mime-Version: 1.0 Mime-Version: 1.0 Mime-Version: 1.0 Mime-Version: 1.0 Mime-Version: 1.0 Mime-Version: 1.0 Mime-Version: 1.0 Does that make it version 7.0? +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | BearHeart / Bill Weinman | BearHeart@bearnet.com | http://www.bearnet.com/= =20 | Author of The CGI Book -- http://www.bearnet.com/cgibook/=20
Received on Sunday, 28 January 1996 15:36:06 UTC