Please clarify * is legal in HTTP1/1 Accept-Charset Header

Dear Members of HTTP Working Group:

I want to make sure that * is legal in Accept-Charset header. 
So the following HTTP header is valid:

Accept-charset: utf-8,iso-8859-5,*

The reason we need * in the Accept-Charset header is because we support
many 
charset in our product and we don't want to send the full list of them
in the
HTTP header. Neither do we think we should provide an UI to allow user
to select charset
becuase we don't want to force user to understand what a charset is. 

The header "Accept-charset: utf-8,iso-8859-5,*" mean the user prefer 
utf-8 and iso-8859-5, but if the server do not have that two charset,
send the client
whatever the server have.

Thanks.

> Subject: 
>          Re: Accept-Charset support
>    Date: 
>          Thu, 5 Dec 1996 14:41:49 PST
>   From: 
>          Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
>      To: 
>          Chris.Lilley@sophia.inria.fr
>     CC: 
>          mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch, www-international@w3.org,
>          Alan_Barrett/DUB/Lotus.LOTUSINT@crd.lotus.com, bobj@netscape.com,
>          wjs@netscape.com, Chris.Lilley@sophia.inria.fr, erik@netscape.com,
>          Ed_Batutis/CAM/Lotus@crd.lotus.com
> 
> 
> # That implies that sending
> #       Accept-Charset: utf-8
> # Should generate a 406 response if the document is only available in, say,
> # Latin-1 and the server cannot convert that to UTF-8.
> 
> I think Latin-1 is a special case. From
> draft-ietf-http-v11-spec-07.txt:
> 
> # The ISO-8859-1 character set can be assumed to be acceptable to all
> # user agents.
> 
> I think the simple thing to do is to send:
> 
>         accept-charset: utf-8,iso-8859-5
> 
> if you're a browser and can display utf-8 and 8859-5 as well as
> 8859-1.  If you're a search service or willing to load things to local
> disk, then you can put a * at the end:
> 
> accept-charset: utf-8,iso-8859-5,*
> 
> Please don't ask me to read the HTTP/1.1 spec to you, though. I didn't
> write it, I was just the committee chair.
> 
> If this is really ambiguous and you'd like the HTTP/1.1 spec
> clarified, make a specific proposal for what it SHOULD say and send it
> to http-wg@cuckoo.hpl.hp.com.
> 
> Larry

-- 

Frank Tang      Internationaliztion Engineer
(415) 937-2913  Netscape Communication Corp
about:ftang     http://home.netscape.com/people/ftang
mailto:ftang@netscape.com
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Mountain View, CA 94043

Received on Wednesday, 8 January 1997 16:25:48 UTC