- From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
- Date: Thu, 12 Dec 1996 12:31:30 PST
- To: mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch
- CC: Drazen.Kacar@public.srce.hr, Chris.Lilley@sophia.inria.fr, www-international@w3.org, Alan_Barrett/DUB/Lotus.LOTUSINT@crd.lotus.com, bobj@netscape.com, wjs@netscape.com, erik@netscape.com, Ed_Batutis/CAM/Lotus@crd.lotus.com
# However, what I (and others) object against very strongly is # the combination of RFC 1522 with the exception for ISO-8859-1. # If everybody has to use RFC 1522, there must not be an # exception for ISO-8859-1. ISO-8859-1 and Western Europe is # not really anything special. If we choose RFC 1522, then # everybody should use it, there should not be any exceptions. The exception for ISO-8859-1 for warning messages in HTTP is based on the fact that there is an exception for ISO-8859-1 for text documents, and that it made no sense for the protocol to be inconsistent. It is a historical fact that the web's origin at CERN in western Europe gives it a western-European bias. This is perhaps unfortunate (if you're not a western European), but your proposal that the default be UTF-8 doesn't actually advantage much of the world that currently has different encodings as their default. You're proposing that recipients apply heuristics to decide if the warning messages are in UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1. This seems like a bad idea, to make something that's deterministic into something that's heuristic. The 12-byte overhead for the "=?UTF-8?Q?" and "?=" suffix in the warning message isn't so big, and isn't really "Clogging up the 8-bit channel". Perhaps by the time Unicode is widespread -- in the next 3-5 years -- we'll have a new version of HTTP 2.x or HTTP-NG. I would certainly propose that in the future, new versions of HTTP default to UTF-8. Regards, Larry
Received on Thursday, 12 December 1996 15:56:27 UTC