Re: Charset labelling (Was: Comments on: "Character Set" Considered Harmful)

Dave Saunders (dave@intercon.com)
Fri, 28 Apr 95 10:10:07 EDT

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> There was a propsal earlier for :
>
> mime-version: 1.0
> content-type: text/html; charset=iso-2022-jp
>
> <HTML>
> ...
> </HTML>
>
> and now your proposal for :
>
> <HTML>
> <HEAD>
> <META HTTP-EQUIV=Content-Type contents="text/html; charset=
> iso-2022-jp"> </HEAD
> ...
> </HTML>

I prefer the later approach as browsers can also read files locally. However
what do you do when the character set overrides Latin 1 values that would have
otherwise been required to be escaped (such as the '<' and '>' characters)?
This could happen with 7-bit shifted JIS.

Another idea (that still doesn't solve the above question) is a charset tag
that would allow the embedding of alternate character set data.

<charset charset="iso-2022-jp">
Data
.
.
.
</charset>

Another variation...

<charset charset="iso-2022-jp" text="data" alt="Latin 1 text">

Either of the charset tags would allow a browser that can't display the data
to create a user element of some sort. The user could then have the option to
save the data off for viewing in another application.

Dave

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______________________________________________________________
Dave Saunders <dave@intercon.com>
Director of Engineering
InterCon Systems Corp

-Opinions expressed in this document are not necessarily held
by InterCon Systems.
______________________________________________________________
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