The document is maintained at Spyglass. Submissions are processed
by hand, right Eric?
> Rather than restricting its value, we can avoid limiting
>the value of the charset parameter but note that the allowable values
>for "charset" may be limited by the context. This pushes the WWW
>problem to HTTP-WG, and makes HTML 2.0 neutral on the issue. (That
>is, the spec is compatible with current practice but also describes a
>legal extension mechanism for going beyond current practice.)
This sounds like the way to go, to me.
The critical distinction is that existing implementations are largely
_compatible_ with this specification, even though they don't implement
all of it. For example:
Existing clients that see:
Content-Type: text/html
blah blah bla in US-ASCII
handle it consistent with the MIME spec: they display the right
US-ASCII characters.
The fact that HTTP servers currently send:
Content-Type: text/html
blah blah in ISO8859-1, with accented characters
isn't quite conforming to the MIME spec, but it's a reasonable
extension, given that the default Content-Transfer-Encoding in HTTP is
binary.
Existing clients that see:
Content-Type: text/html; charset="ISO-2022-JP"
blah blah blah with escape sequences and japanese data
behave in a conforming manner in that they treat it as an unrecognized
content type, and they treat it like application/octet-stream (e.g.
they offer to save it to a file.)
The specification should include some sort of NOTE: to cover the
two current practices that are broken:
1. Most existing clients misbehave when seeing:
Content-Type: text/html; charset=US-ASCII
blah blah bla in US-ASCII
or
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
blah blah in ISO8859-1, with accented characters
They are bound to handle it just like they handle unadorned "text/html",
but they do not.
2. Some existing servers send:
Content-Type: text/html
blah blah ISO2022-style escape sequences etc.
This has no specified meaning for conforming clients.
Daniel W. Connolly "We believe in the interconnectedness of all things"
Software Engineer, Hal Software Systems, OLIAS project (512) 834-9962 x5010
<connolly@hal.com> http://www.hal.com/%7Econnolly