Re: Please clarify * is legal in HTTP1/1 Accept-Charset Header

On Jan 9, 10:46am, Koen Holtman wrote:

> Even if procedural reasons do not allow adding the wildcard to 1.1, it can
> still be defined on top of 1.1.  I do so in the upcoming revision of the
> transparent content negotiation draft.  Here is the text:
> [...]
>    Accept-Charset: iso-8859-5;q=0.8, *;q=0.9
>
>    This specification does assign a special meaning: servers and
>    clients capable of transparent content negotiation must take "*" as
>    a wildcard matching every character set not explicitly mentioned
>    elsewhere in the Accept-Charset header.  As an example, the above
>    header assigns a quality value of 0.9 to the iso-8859-2 charset.

I would urge you to add additional wording such that, in the absence of an
explicit q factor, the wildcard has a default, low q factor such as 0.1.

This applies to Accept and Accept-Language as well. It would correct a
sitiation where browsers send a list of things they do accept, followed
by *, and this is (currently) often taken to mean exactly the same as
if they had only sent the *. Some existing servers allocate 0.1 to a
wildcard (and a somewhat higher value to a partial wildcard, such as
audio/*). It would be excellent to have this behaviour explicitly part
of the specification.


-- 
Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/people/chris/              INRIA,  Projet W3C
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