Re: changes to HTML draft re: character sets
yergeau@alis.ca
Mon, 16 Jan 95 14:37:51 EST
Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com> writes:
>The main technical issue (outside of some comments on confusing
>wording) is whether the HTML 2.0 spec will say what values for
>"charset" are acceptable. I'm assuming that we are going to
>explicitly follow section 7.1.1 of RFC1521.TXT, namely:
>
> [deleted for brevity]
>
>In this case, the text/html type being defined utilizes a "charset"
>parameter. 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 is very much better than restricting to Latin-1, and I hope it
makes it in the proposal.
Of note is that if ISO-2022-JP and relatives are admitted as valid
charsets (as they should), the door is opened to multiple charsets,
using the switching mechanism of ISO-2022. Oh, and I guess
unicode-1-1-utf7 can play, too?
--
Francois Yergeau <yergeau@alis.ca>
Alis technologies Inc.
+1 514 738-9171