- From: Klaus Weide <kweide@tezcat.com>
- Date: Mon, 16 Dec 1996 23:20:19 -0600 (CST)
- To: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
- Cc: www-international@w3.org, http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
On Sat, 14 Dec 1996, Larry Masinter wrote: > > I'll ask again: could you demonstrate two equivalent documents that > you might want to use content negotiation to distinguish between, > where accept-charset (as an expression of capability) and > accept-language (as an expression of language) are inadequate to > distinguish between them? > > If no one has any realistic examples, perhaps the issue is moot? Currently accept-charset is de facto used as an expression of _two_ capabilities: (1) to decode a character encoding, (2) to be able to display (or take responsibility for) a certain character repertoire. The second aspect is not new, is has been around as long as MIME had a charset parameter. It will be lost when/if everything moves to UTF-8 (and starts using accept-charset: utf-8 / charset=utf-8). Example of a site where documents are provided in several charsets (all for the same language): see <URL: http://www.fee.vutbr.cz/htbin/codepage>. It is of course not desirable that a server would have to deal with such a variety of codepages/charsets, but rather the result of an unfortunate state of nonstandardization. Which seems to be a big problem in that part of the world, and no doubt also in other places, and it may last for a while. Anyway you asked for an example where accept-charset and accept-language together are inadequate to distinguish between versions a server is willing to provide. Currently they are adequate for this site; they would not if the site chose to always use UTF-8 while still supporting the current set of clients with their varying codepages. It is certainly much easier to make a Web clients able to decode UTF-8 to locally available character sets, than to upgrade all client machines so that they have fonts available to display all of the 10646 characters. I assume the former will be done much sooner, and that use of UTF-8 should be encouraged before all the fonts (or knowledge to choose culturally correct replacement representations) are available to everyone. Klaus
Received on Monday, 16 December 1996 21:22:33 UTC