RE: How-To handle i18n when you don't know charset?

[Chris Wendt]

Mike Brown [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote
>My experimentation indicated that if the user did not have their browser
set
>to auto-select encoding, or if they manually overrode the encoding
>selection, the form data would be sent in whatever they had chosen,
>regardless of what charset may be in the <meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
>...> in the HTML document head. So I don't think it's good practice to rely
>on the assumption that the encoding of the form data submission will always
>be the same as the encoding of the form itself. In != Out :)

IE4 does not allow manual override of the <meta ... charset=...> tag.
IE5 does - based on user feedback who encountered too many wrongly tagged
pages - allow manual override but will always set the _charset_ to the
charset actually used for the submission.

>I noticed this. It is an interesting workaround for a hole in the HTML
specs
>and RFC 2070, but it is also something that has to be specially decoded on
>the receiving end.

Yes, correct. The nice thing is you can .write the input immediately back to
the browser and user will see her input as typed. Bad if the CGI trashes the
data afterwards.....