- From: David Norris <kg9ae@geocities.com>
- Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1998 00:08:57 -0500
- To: "WAI" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
>>If I put an HTTP-EQUIV Content-type into a web page then (as I understand >>it) I don't need to rely on the person who runs the server setting it up >>to give the correct content-type for all my pages. Well, kind of. They might get double hits for every one of your files. (Browser bug or feature? Hmmm. I can only guess that the browser switches accept languages on the second request. I am not really clear on why there is a second request. IE does this, I know. I am not sure how Nav handles other charsets.) Once to read the file and realize the server sent the wrong header, and, the second to retrieve it using the equivalent header. HEADER> Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-7 EQUIV> Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-7 Should be no different in effect. But, it may cause unwanted problems. I feel that having the server send the proper headers is desirable. One can give users limited control over the server headers quite easily. Busy, lazy, or ignorant sysadmins often just don't bother to properly configure the server, though. I would suggest you ask the sysadmin to allow you to use an access (often .htaccess) file or similar construct. You could then tell the server what content-type to send for those files, among other useful things. Also, some servers (Such as Apache) support multilingual webs. With this configuration, index.html would be the server's default language page (often English), index.html.fr would be the default page for browsers with FR (French) as the primary accept language, index.html.es would be the default for browsers with ES (Spanish) set as the primary accept language, etc. This, of course, depends on proper configuration of the server. In effect, a French browser that requests http://someserver/index.html would seamlessly be served http://someserver/index.html.fr with a properly configured server. Pages without translations would use the default language version of the page. >I wouldn't think that was true. The average server defaults to sending >files as plain text for any resource it doesn't understand. I don't >believe that setting an HTTP-EQUIV would work if the file is binary >(program/audio/video) and the server sends that as text. Uh, how would you set an HTTP-EQUIV in a non-html file? The default MIME type on most web servers is text/plain. However this doesn't effect how the server transfers the file to the client. HTTP servers send all streams in binary mode. The only difference, to the server, between a text file and image, for example, is the Content-Type header. In HTML, you have to use the proper Content-Type to tell the browser how to interpret the binary codes as text when you go above 7-bit US ASCII characters. ,David Norris World Wide Web - http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/1652/ Illusionary Web - http://illusionary.dyn.ml.org/ <-- 02:00 - 10:00 GMT Video/Audio Phone - callto:illusionary.dyn.ml.org Page via mail - 412039@pager.mirabilis.com ICQ Universal Internet Number - 412039 E-Mail - kg9ae@geocities.com
Received on Wednesday, 2 September 1998 01:08:38 UTC