Re: cache-busting document

W.Sylwestrzak@icm.edu.pl wrote:
> Sorry for being sligtly off topic. flame me, if I'm going too far.

Consider yourself flamed. :)

> Drazen Kacar wrote:
> 
> > There are many clients which can't do charset stuff right. Am I supposed
> > to put "Usable only with the latest Lynx beta" on my pages? If not,
> > I have to make content readable in some way. Cache busting is a reasonable
> > price to pay, if you ask me.
> 
> OK, after reading your arguments, I see your point.
> Actually I was more thinking about converting character encodings
> within one character set, e.g. ISO-8859-2 to CP1250
> and claimed that most clients (netscape, msie, lynx) can do it.

Only the development version of Lynx (which is installed at exactly one
host in Croatia). Chartrans stuff is still not in the official version.
And my servers are getting too much hits from the old versions of the
other two.

> E.g. there are over 20 different character encoding schemes in Poland,
> with many of them present on the Internet.
> Fortunately, due to extensive campaign for it ISO-8859-2 is the most 
> common now, but with servers offering possibilities of 8 different
> encodings (trying to satisfy every possible client) - you can imagine
> caching nightmare we have.

I don't have to, I have the same situation. Writing that kind of converter
is also a nightmare.

> But you are of course right - there should be at least easy possibility
> of mapping richer charsets into ASCII (by stripping all accents and extras).
> And again - I'm surprised - why so few clients have this, seemingly obvious
> functionality :-(

It's not so simple. Stripping extras will work for most of the characters,
but some have two letter ASCII approximations. As far as I know, nobody
assembled tables with ASCII approximations for all ISO 8859-x code pages.

-- 
 .-.   .-.    Life is a sexually transmitted disease.
(_  \ /  _)
     |        dave@srce.hr
     |        dave@fly.cc.fer.hr

Received on Tuesday, 10 June 1997 19:59:47 UTC