Re: changes to HTML draft re: character sets

Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@hal.com)
Mon, 16 Jan 95 16:00:16 EST

In message <95Jan16.122629pst.2760@golden.parc.xerox.com>, Larry Masinter write
s:
>> 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
>
>Do you think this belongs in the HTML specification? I can't quite
>figure out where it would go; perhaps it should go in the HTTP
>specification?

Ah. Yes. Well... it's not a normative part of either specification;
but it wouldn't hurt for it to be an informative note in both specs.

Hmmm... this reminds me:

Currently, we specify an <!SGML> declaration for HTML, and I had
expected that changes to the MIME charset= parameter would imply
corresponding changes to the character set declaration in the <!SGML>
declaration.

If we specify that the charset= parameter can take values other
than ISO8859-1, we must also specify the corresponding SGML character
set declarations, no?

I don't know how to specify the character set corresponding to
ISO2022-JP, or even if it's possible.

Could anybody out there on sgml-internet help us out?

Do any of the SGML vendors support non-western writing systems?
What SGML declaration might you use in conjunction with a document
represented in Unicode? ISO2022-JP? Others?

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

p.s. for sgml-internet folks: an archive of html-wg is available at
http://www.acl.lanl.gov/HTML_WG/archives.html if you would like
to come up to speed.