RE: Google is [++dumb]

From: Yves Arrouye (yves@realnames.com)
Date: Mon May 07 2001 - 03:54:59 EDT


> Hmm, then I'm wondering if there's any http 'mechanism'
> by which we can tell the server in which encoding(s) we want
> to receive
> the result in what preference order (like we do with 'languages')

It's called Accept-Charset. Some browsers may let you specify extra HTTP
headers for your requests. Section 14.2 of RFC 2616 reads:

[Begin quote]

14.2 Accept-Charset

   The Accept-Charset request-header field can be used to indicate what
   character sets are acceptable for the response. This field allows
   clients capable of understanding more comprehensive or special-
   purpose character sets to signal that capability to a server which is
   capable of representing documents in those character sets.

      Accept-Charset = "Accept-Charset" ":"
              1#( ( charset | "*" )[ ";" "q" "=" qvalue ] )

   Character set values are described in section 3.4. Each charset MAY
   be given an associated quality value which represents the user's
   preference for that charset. The default value is q=1. An example is

      Accept-Charset: iso-8859-5, unicode-1-1;q=0.8

   The special value "*", if present in the Accept-Charset field,
   matches every character set (including ISO-8859-1) which is not
   mentioned elsewhere in the Accept-Charset field. If no "*" is present
   in an Accept-Charset field, then all character sets not explicitly
   mentioned get a quality value of 0, except for ISO-8859-1, which gets
   a quality value of 1 if not explicitly mentioned.

   If no Accept-Charset header is present, the default is that any
   character set is acceptable. If an Accept-Charset header is present,
   and if the server cannot send a response which is acceptable
   according to the Accept-Charset header, then the server SHOULD send
   an error response with the 406 (not acceptable) status code, though
   the sending of an unacceptable response is also allowed.

[End quote]

YA



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