Re: URIs in HTML5 and issues arising

On Jun 30, 2008, at 18:16, Julian Reschke wrote:

> I personally dislike the idea of intermediates recoding, but that  
> doesn't mean it doesn't happen...


Where does it happen? WAP gateways don't count, because the kind of  
clients one would use with a WAP gateway aren't suitable for browsing  
the Web.

I suspect that transcoding proxies on the Web (as opposed to "mobile  
webs") are mythical. If they ever existed, they are obsolete nowadays.  
Certainly transcoding away from UTF-8 is a totally obsolete concept,  
since Web browsers support UTF-8. (This is a circular statement:  
Obviously, a piece of software that doesn't support UTF-8 isn't  
suitable for browsing the Web.)

Moreover, the idea that transcoding proxies were deployed between Web  
servers and Web browsers is also implausible due to the way the  
character encoding that reaches the browsers affects form submission.  
How could you deploy a transcoding proxy without breaking form  
submissions?

Over the years when I've asked for examples, people citing to  
transcoding intermediates as a potential problem never point to an  
actual deployment of a transcoding Web intermediate that is truly an  
independent intermediate (i.e. a proxy). Instead, people tend to cite  
Russian Apache or, on occasion, other Apache filtering solutions.  
These are transcoding on the origin server and under the control of  
the publisher.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Monday, 30 June 2008 19:15:22 UTC