Forms and CharSets

With forms, there is the accept-charset and I am trying to understand its 
functionality a bit more.  I have a situation where users will need to 
enter data into a database that can *only* handle ISO-8859-1 
characters.  In respect to accept-charset, if a Japanese user is viewing a 
site in shift-jis and goes to enter data, what will the data entry and 
submit behavior be if accpet-charset is set to iso-8859-1?  I must 
apologize for asking this, but I'm in a crunch right now and don't have 
time to do the simulation.  I'm hoping I can leverage someone else's 
experience.

Can the shift-jis user enter data at all?  What encoding will the browser 
use assuming the rest of the page is in shift-jis and accept-charset is set 
to iso-8859-1?  The underlying picture is that I want users of other 
languages to still be able to enter data into this database via am HTML 
form provided they can read/write English while the rest of the page is 
still in their native tongue.  Ideally, the entry would not bomb when they 
hit submit but instead either shift the browser to 8859-1 or alert the user 
that we can't handle the input.

I can't revise the database at this time and am trying to come up with some 
workarounds.  Longer term, we will change the database structures and all 
the collateral scripts.

Any thoughts?

--G--

Received on Wednesday, 15 September 1999 15:49:00 UTC