Re: html, http, urls and internationalisation

"Donald E. Eastlake 3rd" writes:

> How helpful is the MIME header character encoding syntax documented in
> RFC 1522?

I think Donald referes to the MIME header syntax - as an example:
=?iso-8859-1?Q?=27Keld_J=F8rn_Simonsen=27?= <keld@dkuug.dk> 

This has the merit of being MIME, well specified, and routines
already exsist in networking software packages to handle this.

Another proposal could be to use an "Url-encoding"
Url-Encoding: utf-8
Url: proto://www.firm.org/etc/

This has the advantage of being better backwards compatible -
in many cases servers can just ignore the "Url-Encoding" header
(default for unrecognized headers I think). Also URLs today already
have an escape technique which is different from the MIME escapes -
%xx instead of =xx .  I think there is no need to use 8-bit encoding,
the URLs should always be sent 7-bit encoded, for compatibility
with existing servers. So the "url-encoding" header should provide
the smoothest migration path.

Keld

Received on Tuesday, 30 January 1996 18:27:37 UTC