Re: proposed HTTP changes for charset
Shel Kaphan (sjk@amazon.com)
Mon, 8 Jul 1996 07:47:19 -0700
Benjamin Franz writes:
...
>
> Ok. All of these cases work ok. So the problem has got to be when you
> stick a proxy in the line. How does mandating charsets break proxies?
> I don't see it.
>
> --
> Benjamin Franz
>
>
One case is when a 1.1 proxy receives a document from a 1.0 server,
and it is unlabelled. The proxy stores the document in its cache, and
on a later request from a 1.1 client, has to do something about the
charset. If charset labelling is mandatory the proxy has to guess,
which is not going to work. So if charset labelling is mandatory in
1.1, either the proxy has to have some way of indicating the content
has an unknown charset, or (ugh) it would have to revert to 1.0
protocol so that it could legally send an unlabelled response.
Shel