- From: Albert Lunde <Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu>
- Date: Sat, 2 Mar 1996 09:29:34 -0600 (CST)
- To: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
> > Nickolay Saukh: > > > >4.2 Accept-Charset > > > >I think last sentence of first paragraph should be written as > >"The ISO-8859-1 character set can be assumed to be acceptable > >to all user agents.". > > There was a long discussion about ISO-8859-1 versus US-ASCII recently, > and I must admit that I did not read all messages in that discussion. > My impression at the end was that most people wanted US-ASCII to stay > as the character set which can be assumed to be acceptable to all user > agents. I wouldn't say I _want_ this. One could argue that US-ASCII is the default character set in MIME mail, but historically, prior versions of the HTTP/HTML spec have specificed ISO-8859-1 as the default character set for the Web. What I recall someone suggesting recently was that because of the (IMHO broken) state of current practice, one couldn't safely state that user agents actually were defaulting to ISO-8859-1. Independent of this line of argument, the discussion of internationalization that went into the HTML 2.0 RFC established the requirement that all HTML interpreters should use an SGML document character set that included at least the characters of ISO-8859-1. This doesn't say anything much about the encoding, but it tends to imply that support for ISO-8859-1 is a practical requirement to comply with the HTML 2.0 spec.
Received on Saturday, 2 March 1996 07:31:06 UTC