"Edward H. Trager" wrote on 2004-10-11 18:06 UTC: > You have a good point that perhaps Apache should have no encoding > set by default, thus forcing everyone to read the documentation and > make a decision.
The spec on http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/charset.html#h-5.2.2 says The HTTP protocol ([RFC2616], section 3.7.1) mentions ISO-8859-1 as a default character encoding when the "charset" parameter is absent from the "Content-Type" header field. In practice, this recommendation has proved useless because some servers don't allow a "charset" parameter to be sent, and others may not be configured to send the parameter. Therefore, user agents must not assume any default value for the "charset" parameter. I guess, this "assume-nothing" rule could reasonably be extended to HTTP servers as well. With the now rapidly ongoing deployment of UTF-8, ISO 8859-1 is by far not as commonplace any more as it was two years ago. Markus -- Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__ -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
