Re: lynx-dev HTML4.0 and default charset

[Leonid Pauzner]

3-Mar-99 08:51 David Woolley wrote:
>>
>> > 4) Although META headers are supposed to control the server, I have
>>               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^???
>> no, they are for clients.

> This whole area is a mess and it looks as the W3C have been doing a
> lot of firefighting to try and work round abuses by browser writers
> and content providers.
...
You right here, the most notable problem is a proxy which may be in aware
of document content, and _can_ translate the text/* document to another charset
and should change META, and we probably may get a situation where
HTTP charset and META charset both present but different,
or both absent but we need to _guess_ a default charset here -
so lots of places to fail for proxies/browsers which do not conform
to recent standards.
I saw all this kind of problems in real life for *.ru domains but last year
things stabilized: 95% clients are from Windows platform and content providers
know this, so koi8 pages has HTTP charset for sure, while the others
usually serve HTTP charset - if not we always guess from win-1251
and situation moves to the direction we less need to guess something.

...
> This is probably politically unacceptable for many service providers
not a politically inacceptable, but as you wrote previously
"it is not something to understand"... especially when use Microsoft
products (or all of your customers does).

> outside the ISO 8859/1 area, or even within that area where "just send
> Windows charset" is the norm, but who don't want to lock users into a
> particular default.

> Note that RFC 2068 is effectively only an early draft, and at least one
> more recent draft expires on March 11th, so there may still be time to
> get in comments before HTTP 1.1 is finalised.  (I haven't checked to
> see if this has been superceded.)
I saw several recent revisions of the draft (#4, #5 and #6)
and difference mostly spelling or so, I doubt charset area may be changed
unexpectedly. Anyway, it have a neglect effect on a market leaders.