- From: Gavin Nicol <gtn@ebt.com>
- Date: Mon, 22 Jan 1996 21:34:38 -0500
- To: masinter@parc.xerox.com
- Cc: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
>> In the current Netscape, I can set a preference about encodings, and if I >> choose "Japanese, auto-detect", not only do I get ugly fonts for my >> ISO-8859-1 text, but some IS0-8859-1 get mapped to inappropriate >> glyphs at display time. On the other hand, if I set it to ISO-8859-1, >> then my Japanes text comes out looking like garbage. > >I agree, it's awful. How would you suggest describing the mess we've >got ourselves into? Well, I guess this is a hint that I should stop complaining, and contribute to the production of the information RFC. I thought about this quite a lot, and I couldn't think of much apart from "a mess" ;-) Seriously though, we could put some language like the following in the draft. ----- Note that currenlty, most servers do not add the "charset" parameter to the content descriptor. For documents that use any character set or encoding other than ISO 8859-1, this leads to severe interoperability problems. Most current browsers are capable of performing a limited amount of encoding auto-sensing, but this mechanism is unreliable, and results in many inconveniences for end-users. Incorrect, or lack of labelling also hampers the deployment of many useful applications like code conversion servers and automatic translation systems.
Received on Monday, 22 January 1996 18:40:33 UTC