charset= history, proposal
Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@hal.com)
Fri, 06 Jan 1995 17:47:47 -0600
In message <199501062216.OAA00888@neon.mcom.com>, Bob Jung writes:
>In the HTML2 spec in Section 2.4, sub-heading "Character sets"
>(http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/html/html2/htmlspec281194_9.html#HEADING16),
>there is the statement that the charset parameter is reserved for future use:
>
> Character sets
> The charset parameter is reserved for future use. See Section
> 2.16 for a discussion of character sets and encodings in HTML.
>
>Does someone know the history behind this paragraph?
I suppose I do. If you could be more specific, I might be able to
give a better answer.
But the gist of it is: MIME (rfc1521) defines some semantics for
text/* charset=... which make a certain amount of sense for the web,
but aren't widely supported.
So the 2.0 can't say "do what MIME says" cuz then it wouldn't be
descriptive of current practice. So it says "don't use charset= at
all. Just use ISO-8859-1 implicitly all the time". That was the only
semantics we were going to standardize.
The theory was that we wanted to get the 2.0 document out in short
order, and that this issue could wait until later.
Now it's later, and this issue clearly needs addressing.
>How does this affect our discussions about using the charset parameter?
It means that we're now figuring out the "reserved for future use"
semantics.
Regarding your proposal <199501060510.VAA15861@neon.mcom.com>...
First: it looks good in general.
But I'd like to take a look at it from a few perspectives:
(1) the language lawyer/formal specs perspective
(2) the information provider perspective
(3) the information consumer perspective