- From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
- Date: Fri, 6 Dec 1996 09:27:22 PST
- To: Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu
- CC: www-international@w3.org
We're not really in bad shape if everyone plays by these rules for those documents that cannot be represented in latin 1: a) EVERY client accepts UTF8. Any client may also accept other charsets, or even _all_ charsets. There is no advantage, though, in accepting 80%, though. If a client knows all charsets, it just leaves out "accept-charset" and takes what it gets. Otherwise, client sends a very short: Accept-charset: utf8, charset1, charset2 b) EVERY server knows how to send UTF8. The server may send whatever the native encoding is, though, if either the client didn't set accept-charset, or if the client included the native encoding in the accept-charset. If the document can be represented in latin 1, the 'accept-charset' is just ignored, and the document is sent. How can a client 'accept all charsets'? Well, let's make sure that 'all charsets' isn't an infinite set. We should limit charsets to those that are registered with IANA, we should make sure there's some kind of well-known transliteration service/table/applet that can be dynamically downloaded for charset-to-UTF8 or charset-to-font for new ones. Larry
Received on Friday, 6 December 1996 13:27:28 UTC