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

I suggest having a wording saying that the wildcard in absence of
a q-value should be used with a lower priority than any explicitly
enumerated charset.

Jürgen.

Chris Lilley wrote:
> 
> On Jan 9, 10:46am, Koen Holtman wrote:
> 
> > Even if procedural reasons do not allow adding the wildcard to 1.1, it can
> > still be defined on top of 1.1.  I do so in the upcoming revision of the
> > transparent content negotiation draft.  Here is the text:
> > [...]
> >    Accept-Charset: iso-8859-5;q=0.8, *;q=0.9
> >
> >    This specification does assign a special meaning: servers and
> >    clients capable of transparent content negotiation must take "*" as
> >    a wildcard matching every character set not explicitly mentioned
> >    elsewhere in the Accept-Charset header.  As an example, the above
> >    header assigns a quality value of 0.9 to the iso-8859-2 charset.
> 
> I would urge you to add additional wording such that, in the absence of an
> explicit q factor, the wildcard has a default, low q factor such as 0.1.
> 
> This applies to Accept and Accept-Language as well. It would correct a
> sitiation where browsers send a list of things they do accept, followed
> by *, and this is (currently) often taken to mean exactly the same as
> if they had only sent the *. Some existing servers allocate 0.1 to a
> wildcard (and a somewhat higher value to a partial wildcard, such as
> audio/*). It would be excellent to have this behaviour explicitly part
> of the specification.
> 
> --
> Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
> Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
> http://www.w3.org/people/chris/              INRIA,  Projet W3C
> chris@w3.org                       2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
> +33 (0)4 93 65 79 87       06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Friday, 10 January 1997 11:40:30 UTC