Re: [XHR] Request charset is limited to UTF-8 for x-www-form-urlencoded data

On Mon, 23 Jun 2008 01:22:20 +0200, Yaroslav <yarosla@gmail.com> wrote:
> In the current spec
> (http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-XMLHttpRequest-20080415/) I do not see
> the possibility to POST application/x-www-form-urlencoded data with
> charset other than UTF-8. I think this is limiting factor, which
> should be avoided. UTF-8 is good versatile encoding but it is not
> always practical to use it. When developing sites in Russian, for
> example, we mainly use windows-1251 encoding, UTF-8 is rarely used as
> it doubles network traffic.
>
> The spec says:
>
>> data is a DOMString
>> Encode data using UTF-8 for transmission.
>> If a Content-Type header is set using setRequestHeader() set the  
>> charset parameter of that header to UTF-8.
>
> In my practice application/x-www-form-urlencoded data usually comes
> from custom javascript encoding function (as DOMString). When sending
> it to server over XHR I use setRequestHeader('Content-type',
> 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=windows-1251'). This
> informs the server of the correct encoding. This all worked well until
> FF3 followed the spec.
>
> I think when the user explicitly sets charset with setRequestHeader()
> the browser should not override that. UTF-8 should be used only as
> default.

I don't quite understand how this could actually work given that the  
DOMString will have to be converted to UTF-8. It seems problems would  
already arise there.

Apologies for the late reply by the way; work on XMLHttpRequest has been  
semi-dormant for a while awaiting some more feedback before attempting  
another Last Call.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
http://annevankesteren.nl/

Received on Monday, 12 October 2009 09:30:04 UTC