- From: Roy T. Fielding <fielding@liege.ICS.UCI.EDU>
- Date: Fri, 05 Jul 1996 17:25:38 -0700
- To: Francois Yergeau <yergeau@alis.ca>
- Cc: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
I have already covered these questions ad-nauseum.
1) HTTP has *always* used a default charset value of ISO-8859-1.
All implementations to the contrary had KNOWN failure conditions
and did not work as intended except within locally controlled
environments.
2) The HTTP version defines the communication capability of the
immediately adjacent client or server -- it NEVER indicates that
feature capabilities of the user agent.
3) None of the issues you have raised involve a technical problem
with the HTTP/1.1 protocol -- they are POLITICAL problems that
are an artifact of historical reality, a reality which the IETF
is not capable of changing.
4) Labelling the charset with its real value if it is different than
iso-8859-1 *always* works, both in old an new practice, because
any user agent incapable of handling a charset value is also
incapable of handling a charset other than iso-8859-1. The only
time problems occur is when iso-8859-1 data is labelled as such
and then delivered to an older client.
5) Whether or not a client is capable of understanding the charset
parameter is NOT a function of the protocol version -- ALL HTTP/1.0
clients MUST understand charset, even if HTTP/1.0 is not a "standard",
because that is part of the HTTP/1.0 definition (see RFC 1945).
I see no point in continuing this discussion unless you can demonstrate
a real problem that needs to be solved and can be solved within the
constraints of HTTP/1.1.
...Roy T. Fielding
Department of Information & Computer Science (fielding@ics.uci.edu)
University of California, Irvine, CA 92717-3425 fax:+1(714)824-4056
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/
Received on Friday, 5 July 1996 17:31:54 UTC