Re: Accept-Charset support

Martin,

You haven't really said what's wrong with HTTP/1.1's choice of using
RFC 1522 for warning messages except that

 - you think it is brainless stupidity
 - RFC 1522 was originally designed for something else
 - there's no reason to not have chosen something else
 - 'everybody in the i18n business' uses UTF-8

However, it wasn't 'brainless stupidity', in that the issue got fair
consideration and a reasonable amount of thought. I believe that our
consideration was that operating systems and web configurations on
servers that normally do not use unicode internally should not be
constrainted to convert the warning message strings to unicode merely
to display an error message.

Furthermore, the design doesn't preclude using Unicode, albeit RFC
1522's =?UTF-8?Q?method?= is a bit awkward, it's only a 12-byte
overhead on a warning message.

Larry

Received on Wednesday, 11 December 1996 18:49:21 UTC