Re: Accept-Charset support
Koen Holtman (koen@win.tue.nl)
Thu, 19 Dec 1996 01:12:58 +0100 (MET)
Klaus Weide:
>
[...]
>Examples where "Language" is treated as carrying charset meaning
>(not just repertoire, but "charset" including encoding):
First, thanks for collecting these examples.
>Pages that do the poor-man's negotiation of letting the user select
>a "language" manually, than return a page whose charset may vary
>depending on the language choice.
> <URL: http://www.alis.com/internet_products/language.en.html>
> <URL: http://www.accentsoft.com/>
> <URL: http://www.dkuug.dk/maits/>
Hm, I would not call this `language carrying implied charset meaning'. If I
were to make a page like the ones above, I would leave out all mention of
requiring support for the appropriate charset too, because of stylistic
reasons.
>Another example, which does "real" (automatic) negotiation:
> <URL: http://www.dkuug.dk:81/maits/summary>
>(For example, with "accept-language: el, en" you get Greek in iso-8859-7
>- even when also sending an "accept-charset" which excludes iso-8859-7.)
I guess this is a case of a CGI programmer making something that is good
enough in the usual case instead of 100% optimal. How many current user
agents send a (reliable) Accept-Charser header anyway?
So I don't interpret your examples as the Accept-Language/Content-language
headers carrying charset meaning. Which is good, actually, because if they
had carried charset meaning, that would have created a nasty negotiation
problem.
> Klaus
Koen.