RE: Bad Content-type headers on Unicode web site?

From: Addison Phillips (addison.phillips@quest.com)
Date: Thu Mar 03 2005 - 23:18:36 CST

  • Next message: Doug Ewell: "Re: Unicode Stability"

    Unfortunately, the default charset for text/* is... wait for it... US-ASCII. I quote RFC 2046:

       A critical parameter that may be specified in the Content-Type field
       for "text/plain" data is the character set. This is specified with a
       "charset" parameter, as in:

         Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

       Unlike some other parameter values, the values of the charset
       parameter are NOT case sensitive. The default character set, which
       must be assumed in the absence of a charset parameter, is US-ASCII.

    If you use text/* types, you need to declare your charset.

    Addison

    Addison P. Phillips
    Globalization Architect, Quest Software
    http://www.quest.com

    Chair, Internationalization Core Working Group
    http://www.w3.org/International

    Internationalization is not a feature.
    It is an architecture.

    > -----Original Message-----
    > From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On
    > Behalf Of Doug Ewell
    > Sent: jeudi 3 mars 2005 20:37
    > To: Unicode Mailing List
    > Cc: Elliotte Harold
    > Subject: Re: Bad Content-type headers on Unicode web site?
    >
    > Elliotte Harold <elharo at metalab dot unc dot edu> wrote:
    >
    > > The URL
    > >
    > > http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/NormalizationTest.txt
    > >
    > > appears to be served as type text/plain with no charset parameter...
    > >
    > > However, that file's contents seem to be UTF-8. Shouldn't this be
    > > changed to
    > >
    > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
    > >
    > > or some such?
    >
    > What is the "default" encoding for text/plain with no charset parameter?
    > Is there one?
    >
    > I like to think UTF-8 is "plain text" as much as Latin-1 or anything
    > else.
    >
    > -Doug Ewell
    > Fullerton, California
    > http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
    >
    >



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