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Re: Accept-Charset support

From: Koen Holtman <koen@win.tue.nl>
Date: Thu, 19 Dec 1996 01:12:58 +0100 (MET)
Message-Id: <199612190012.BAA05523@wsooti08.win.tue.nl>
To: Klaus Weide <kweide@tezcat.com>
Cc: koen@win.tue.nl, http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com, www-international@w3.org
X-Mailing-List: <http-wg@cuckoo.hpl.hp.com> archive/latest/2116
Klaus Weide:
>
[...]
>Examples where "Language" is treated as carrying charset meaning
>(not just repertoire, but "charset" including encoding):

First, thanks for collecting these examples.

>Pages that do the poor-man's negotiation of letting the user select
>a "language" manually, than return a page whose charset may vary 
>depending on the language choice.
>   <URL: http://www.alis.com/internet_products/language.en.html>
>   <URL: http://www.accentsoft.com/>
>   <URL: http://www.dkuug.dk/maits/>   

Hm, I would not call this `language carrying implied charset meaning'.  If I
were to make a page like the ones above, I would leave out all mention of
requiring support for the appropriate charset too, because of stylistic
reasons.

>Another example, which does "real" (automatic) negotiation:
>   <URL: http://www.dkuug.dk:81/maits/summary>
>(For example, with "accept-language: el, en" you get Greek in iso-8859-7
>- even when also sending an "accept-charset" which excludes iso-8859-7.)

I guess this is a case of a CGI programmer making something that is good
enough in the usual case instead of 100% optimal.  How many current user
agents send a (reliable) Accept-Charser header anyway?

So I don't interpret your examples as the Accept-Language/Content-language
headers carrying charset meaning.  Which is good, actually, because if they
had carried charset meaning, that would have created a nasty negotiation
problem.

>  Klaus

Koen.
Received on Wednesday, 18 December 1996 16:15:50 UTC

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