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Re: Debian UTF-8, Mandrake UTF-8, and Apache UTF-8

"Edward H. Trager" wrote on 2004-10-11 18:06 UTC:
> You have a good point that perhaps Apache should have no encoding
> set by default, thus forcing everyone to read the documentation and
> make a decision.

The spec on

  http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/charset.html#h-5.2.2

says

   The HTTP protocol ([RFC2616], section 3.7.1) mentions ISO-8859-1 as
   a default character encoding when the "charset" parameter is absent
   from the "Content-Type" header field. In practice, this recommendation
   has proved useless because some servers don't allow a "charset"
   parameter to be sent, and others may not be configured to send
   the parameter. Therefore, user agents must not assume any default
   value for the "charset" parameter.

I guess, this "assume-nothing" rule could reasonably be extended to HTTP
servers as well. With the now rapidly ongoing deployment of UTF-8,
ISO 8859-1 is by far not as commonplace any more as it was two years ago.

Markus

-- 
Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__


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Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
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