Accept-Charset support

I would like to get agreement on a definite proposal of how WWW browser vendors 
should request a server to send UTF-8.

Browser vendors are not keen to send a very long list of character sets 
accepted due to the overhead. So I propose that the browser vendors pick one of 
the following...

(1) If the user, though the UI, says they want to "Request Multi-Lingual 
Documents" then the browser should send:-

Accept-Charset:UTF-8;q=1,*

However, I am worried that the Accept-Charset may not take a "*" wildcard 
parameter. Does anyone know?

(2) This could be extended to include other charsets that the browser knows it 
can process efficiently. E.g. if the browser is a Japanese localisation or the 
user has chosen a Japanese Accept-Language then ShiftJIS could be included 
after UTF-8 but with a lower q value. The browser could use Accepr-Charset to 
request those Charsets that it can process most efficiently for each of its 
Accept-Languages.

What do people think about this suggestion? Will it work for servers? I am 
really keen to give servers a chance to return UTF-8. How do servers today 
return UTF-8 when Accept-Charset is not generally being sent to them?

 Alan.

Received on Wednesday, 4 December 1996 11:00:20 UTC