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Re: lynx-dev HTML4.0 and default charset


From: Leonid Pauzner
Subject: Re: lynx-dev HTML4.0 and default charset
Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 20:28:44 +0300 (MSK)

4-Mar-99 06:14 Klaus Weide wrote:
> On Thu, 4 Mar 1999, David Woolley wrote:

>> >
>> >    Unfortunately, some older HTTP/1.0 clients did not deal properly with
>> >    an explicit charset parameter. HTTP/1.1 recipients MUST respect the
>> >    charset label provided by the sender; and those user agents that have
>> >    a provision to "guess" a charset MUST use the charset from the
>>                     ^^^^^^^
>>
>> I think guess is really a euphemism for assuming one (probably a compile
>> time choice) of:
>>
>> - Windows character set;
>>
>> - the national character set of the user.

> Since Microsoft clients have the capability of guessing even the MIME type
> (and make bad use of it), perhaps they can also guess charsets by scanning
> the byte stream.

> As far as I understand, encodings used for Japanese often involve dynamic
> guessing (even de facto in Lynx).

Here in Russia we had a phenomenon of "guessing proxies" for early Internet
days when was ~5 russian codepages on the net and no clients were capable
to accept more than one of them. These dynamic "guess" was based on
a probabilities of certain characters in real language (and sometimes we got
wrong double encoding in nontrivial direction without a chance to decode :(

There is no origin problem with a modern browsers now
but we still have "guessing servers" serving encoding based on the
client "accept-charset" field and some unrelevant secondary info,
still have a chance to send without a proper charset if misconfigured.
This is not the last cyrcle of a mystery:
I saw a patch at Mozilla.org to implement guessing for Russian language
(as it was in "guessing proxies") and it is in.

The real problem is to recover people's mind if they was misguided once...



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