Re: charset parameter

On 25.07.01 at 04:40, Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net> wrote:

>* Terje Bless wrote:
>>When it comes time to parse the markup, you already have
>>a charset; the XML/HTML rules do not govern HTTP.
>
>They do for conforming applications.

No they don't! The transport is not dictated by the content; you can send
HTML over FTP, HTTP, SMTP, NNTP, IMAP, MAPI, etc.; and all those transports
can and do transport much much more then just HTML.

When we get to a "Conforming Application", we no longer know whether
"ISO-8859-1" was explicit or implied (by the HTTP 1.1 defaulting rules); we
just know that after all the rules of the Transport have been applied, the
result was "ISO-889-1" (for HTTP 1.1), "US-ASCII" (NNTP), "UTF-8" (for NNTP
"updated" by USEFOR), "EUC-JP" (for FTP combined with locale info), "KOI-8"
(by local policy), "Windows-1252" (MAPI), etc.

We also don't know whether the Content-Transport-Encoding was "8bit",
"Base64", "QP", or "7bit"; because by the time the "Conforming Application"
gets the data it's been turned into "8bit" by the MIME rules.

Received on Thursday, 26 July 2001 00:26:03 UTC