- From: Wojtek Sylwestrzak <W.Sylwestrzak@icm.edu.pl>
- Date: Wed, 11 Jun 1997 18:51:59 +0200 (MET DST)
- To: "Martin J. Duerst" <mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch>
- Cc: W.Sylwestrzak@icm.edu.pl, http-wg@cuckoo.hpl.hp.com
> > The WWW initiated the good practice to rely on a single encoding > at least for a single region, whith choosing iso-8859-1 for > western Europe. Unfortunately, this practice hasn't been followed > in other areas. In each area, there are unfortunately several > encodings by which that area is served well. And it's difficult > to decide on one. In some cases, that's not that much of a problem, > all browsers that know Japanese know how to accept any of the > three major encodings of Japanese. In other cases, it's much > worse. For example, Internet Explorer on the Mac lists iso-8859-3 > for Turkish. Netscape on a Sun lists iso-8859-9. Other such examples > abound. > I wonder, do you feel that an informational document on this would be useful ? (this could in fact even expand a little more into recommendations for email and usenet articles charsets.) Nobody questions iso-8859-1 today, beacuse it's clearly there in the specs. however http standard still remains a little vague, about other charsets, saying that iso-8859-x are good, but anything registered with IANA is almost equally good (as long as it comlplies with MIME). This results in people arguing that it's proper to use e.g. Windows-cp1250, because most of the platforms run Windows anyway etc. This situation is under some control in Poland, but in some other countries (like Czech Rep.) it's a mess. Do you think that trying to enforce single charset for single area (like Western Europe, Central Europe etc) is a good thing ? I think so. But I lack good ideas on how to do it... --wojtek
Received on Wednesday, 11 June 1997 09:54:13 UTC