On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 12:36:19PM +0200, Charlie Clark wrote: > Am 27.03.2012, 12:16 Uhr, schrieb Fred Drake <f...@fdrake.net>: > > >In other words... "the web" will continue to thrive on hacks and > >sniffing data to support users' expectations in spite of the data on > >"the web". I appreciate the motivation (it's not the users' fault > >the content provider can't get it right), it saddens me that there > >will no end of quirks-mode-like data interpretation. And that after > >this many years, we still can't get content-type and encodings > >straightened out. > > True but I think that the problem was largely of our own making in > not coming up with "one, preferably only one" way of handling this. > Re-reading Marius' post I was struck by the whole idea of the > http-server transcoding the content on the fly. Now, I've never > looked at this in detail but have any of the major webservers ever > done that?
No idea. I wish I remembered where I read about that. There used to be a dozen charsets for Russian (koi8-r, windows-1251, cp866, iso-8859-5, x-mac-cyrillic; basically at least one for every OS ;) and some websites even went as far as letting the visitor choose the charset they wanted to see. *google google* "Having words like "please, choose an appropriate encoding" on your pages is really a BAD idea, drives people crazy. [...] Here is my advice. Get the latest version of Apache and a FLY plug-in module written by Igor Sereda (ser...@spb.runnet.ru). The module allows on-the-fly recoding from one character set to another on the basis of either HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET or, if it is not set, it scans "User-Agent" field from which it tries to figure out what platform and OS you are on. I am archiving it on sunsite as well." -- http://www.ibiblio.org/sergei/Software/http.html That document even mentions *proxy servers doing charset conversions on the fly*. (O.o) This is all, of course, completely irrelevant to the modern web. I mention this merely as a historical curiosity, because I find the "why are the rules that way?" type of questions fascinating. Marius Gedminas -- http://pov.lt/ -- Zope 3/BlueBream consulting and development
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