Re: elaboration on MIME and HTTP issue

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• Reply: Larry Masinter: "Re: elaboration on MIME and HTTP issue"

>> It is recommended that the character set of an entity body be
>> labelled as the lowest common denominator of the character codes
>> used within a document, with the exception that no label is
>> preferred over the labels US-ASCII or ISO-8859-1.
> 
>As we've seen, current practice is really that the recipient guesses
>the character set if it isn't labelled. And we've already recommended
>that parameters not be used, so we shouldn't then turn around and
>recommend that the character set be labelled.

It is absolutely vital that content be correctly labelled. I cannot
put it strongly enough. Many interoperability problems spring from
this one lack in servers.

In the current Netscape, I can set a preference about encodings, and if I
choose "Japanese, auto-detect", not only do I get ugly fonts for my
ISO-8859-1 text, but some IS0-8859-1 get mapped to inappropriate
glyphs at display time. On the other hand, if I set it to ISO-8859-1,
then my Japanes text comes out looking like garbage.

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