Apparently so! It's come up several times before, and nobody
has come up with any globally optimal solutions. You'll certainly
want to troll the www-talk archives and see what's been discussed.
For example, you might start with:
"WWW HTML Jun 94: Re: Different character sets in one HTML document"
http://gummo.stanford.edu/html/hypermail/www-html-1994q2/0046.html
> For my part, I'd love to make a few of my non-English
>databases available online, but I don't know how to tell query
>forms to expect something other than ISO 8859-1.
Well... the problem isn't how to announce the data format. You can
make up a new MIME type, if you like. The problem is deploying clients
that understand the data type. We just need lots of prototypes.
>The question for me is just how sophisticated we want clients to
>get.
..
> Yet it would be equally wrong to expect every
>client on every micro to handle every possible case, and to do so all
>at once.
This is an excellent characterization of some of the deployment issues...
>I'm sorry if I seem to be obtruding in a forum without knowing what I
>am doing. As I noted above, I'm in the Humanities, and am simply try-
>ing to see if I can be any help at all....
For a newbie, you've got a pretty good handle on the issues.
Let us know if you figure it all out!
Dan