Re: Language label

> As far as I understand the situation, it would be nice to have that
> information extracted and put in the header for the HEAD request.
> I don't know which type of client could benefit from this, but perhaps
> somebody else does.

I was thinking about robots:  A robot that only look for German docs, for
example.  There are probably other applications.

> > The "charset" information is NECESSARY to interpret the
> > body (of text/* types) and thus MUST appear in the header.
> 
> Yes, but...
> There are enough web admins who don't want to know anything about their
> servers. That means the users can't put charset info in the header.
> META tag is the only thing that remains, at least for text/html.
> Disclaimer: just describing current practice...

The charset must be in the HTTP header and inside the doc in
<META HTTP-EQUIV=Content-Type ...>.  This META should be as near to the
beginning of the doc as possible, as this is a catch-22 situation: how do
the program reads the charset if it does not know the charset in the first
place ?

The doc management system could pre-process the docs, so the server does
not read many information at the precise moment of serving the docs.  But
this is a doc management system factor and one could consider that the
server is "virtually" reading the information (language label, charset,
etc).

Tomas