- From: Gavin Nicol <gtn@ebt.com>
- Date: Wed, 7 Dec 1994 21:31:54 -0500
- To: mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu
- Cc: hallam@alws.cern.ch, http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
>agrees that, in addition to headers, GIFs and audio files and MPEGs and >everything else should be shipped around the network in their canonical form, >rather than in some local form. Luckily, most of the systems that people >use happen, by a convenient coincidence, to locally use the canonical form >or something easily converted into canonical form, so that there isn't a > Um. Please define "canonical text form". There are far too many encodings for this to to exist. MPEG and GIF are shipped as a sequence of bytes. My proposal for dealing with this in HTTP is to have a seperate field for charset negotiation, and to ship Unicode (UTF) (marked up with some languages/presentational tags that are autogenerated) as the "canonical" form into which everything can be converted into and from. My proposal also allows clients to send any other commonly understood charset (or rather encoding/charset pair, though MIME messed these two together... another area where "it's broke"). If MIME does not allow this, it is hopelessly broken, and doomed to be changed at some point in the future. Hence, this CRLF issue should just be ignored as "impractical".
Received on Wednesday, 7 December 1994 18:31:36 UTC