Re: ISO/IEC 10646 as Document Character Set

Erik van der Poel (erik@netscape.com)
Thu, 4 May 95 12:57:09 EDT

> 1. Specify the charset requirement handling now, implement it in
> browsers, but wait 6 months before actually employing it, so that
> most people have updated to browsers with the capacity.

Maybe this is the most realistic solution...

> 2. Do a kind of ESMTP enhanced HTTP negotiation scheme.

Hmmm... Similar to Dan's recent comment about HTTP/1.1. Maybe this
would work, but would there be a consensus? Some people seem to be
against negotiation because of efficiency issues.

The efficiency problem could be solved by designing a solution that is
only inefficient during the transition period.

But how would it work? I just tried:

% telnet www.w3.org 80
...
GET / HTTP/1.1

and it returned the HTML doc corresponding to /, instead of an error.
No good. OK, how about:

GET / BLURFL

Same result (got the HTML doc). No good. OK, how about:

BLURFL / HTTP/1.1

Error. Good. But it CLOSED THE CONNECTION! Arggh. This would be
extremely inefficient!

> 3. having the identity and version number of the calling browser's
> and then react in the server accordingly.

As a temporary solution, maybe. But long term? Yuck.

Erik