Re: ISO/IEC 10646 as Document Character Set
Erik van der Poel (erik@netscape.com)
Thu, 04 May 95 09:44:30 -0700
> 1. Specify the charset requirement handling now, implement it in
> browsers, but wait 6 months before actually employing it, so that
> most people have updated to browsers with the capacity.
Maybe this is the most realistic solution...
> 2. Do a kind of ESMTP enhanced HTTP negotiation scheme.
Hmmm... Similar to Dan's recent comment about HTTP/1.1. Maybe this
would work, but would there be a consensus? Some people seem to be
against negotiation because of efficiency issues.
The efficiency problem could be solved by designing a solution that is
only inefficient during the transition period.
But how would it work? I just tried:
% telnet www.w3.org 80
...
GET / HTTP/1.1
and it returned the HTML doc corresponding to /, instead of an error.
No good. OK, how about:
GET / BLURFL
Same result (got the HTML doc). No good. OK, how about:
BLURFL / HTTP/1.1
Error. Good. But it CLOSED THE CONNECTION! Arggh. This would be
extremely inefficient!
> 3. having the identity and version number of the calling browser's
> and then react in the server accordingly.
As a temporary solution, maybe. But long term? Yuck.
Erik