Re: character problems

[ NOTE: I am no longer subscribed to the www-html list ]

On Wed, 17 Jul 1996, Chris Lilley wrote:

> Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-9959-7

This much I know; but the only way I know I can set HTTP headers is
through CGI which pukes them to stdout; I don't manage the sites that my
pages are hosted on, and how the heck can the site admin make the server
send out the correct headers for every document? Can this be accomplished
through the META tag in the HTML header instead? How woiuld a user agent
respond to getting HTTP headers like this AFTER it starts getting (and
rendering) the HTML? Netscape might do this correctly (though correctly is
a loose and undefined term when we're talking about Netscape, maybe "as
intended" would be better), but will others? 

>   Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-7
> Compare this with your server:
>   Content-type: text/html        <== oops!

It's not my server; it's my pages. I have set up an apache httpd on my
Linux box, but it's not accessible by the world at large because I have
dynamic addressing. My site, as you see, uses Netscape Communications
server. What do I do about it, besides contacting my provider (I also work
for them, and I happen to know the general view point is "Make sure that
Greek trueype fonts are installed in the control panel and change the
encoding in the Preferences Dialog from the Options menu. Unix? Lynx? 
Mosaic? We're sorry, we've never heard of those!")

> Urgh. A Font is an ordered collection of glyphs, the order being given

Well, let's see what we have to set out here:

User agent must render my pages, written in ISO-8859-7, correctly. In
order to do this, it must recognise thatthey are written in ISO-8859-7 and
have the ability to render them accordingly. The second part, I don't care
about. If the user agent can't do it, there's no way around it. But I want
to make a user agent that does, through supporting some
standard/proposal/draft/whatever, recognize such an indication, realise
that the document is in ISO-8859-7. This is done through an HTTP header
line. I can't control what the server sends out as the document's HTTP
header. What do I do?

> Yes, adding an accept-charset attribute to form input fields was another
> thing that the Internationalisation draft did. Then you can create a
> form that accepts Greek, you type in Greek, it gets sent to the server
> CGI script correctly labelled.

I'd like to see some of these things passing through every channel and
becoming true standards. Internationalisation is a big issue, and with
some big OS manufacturers like MS implementing Multilingual support (and
others like Unix platforms supporting it for yyears) it's a shame that no
one knows how exactly to correctly define the language of a document.

================== Stephanos Piperoglou - stephanos@hol.gr ==================
WorldPort - my home on the Web   http://users.hol.gr/~stephanos/index.html
Hellenic Babylon 5 Support Campaign                             babylon5.html
The Alphabeton - the guide to greek-enabled computing           greek.html
                                                          ... and much more!
Official Athens College site:    http://www.gsc.net/hosted/athens_college
===== If my opinions were my employers, they'd be pretty wierd opinions =====

... Oof porothika (tm)

Received on Wednesday, 17 July 1996 08:10:39 UTC