ietf-822
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Re: UTF-8 in headers

1999-01-25 12:10:17
In <199901241800(_dot_)NAA16666(_at_)spot(_dot_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu> Keith 
Moore <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu> writes:


2. Use RFC 2482 (language tags embedded in UTF-8 text). Extremely
flexible, but would undoubtedly raise howls of protest from users whose
existing agents saw them as a sequence of garbage characters (people who
read news can get exceedingly irate when shown such things - as witness
the railings against HTML in news, or even against any form of Mime).
 
essentially nobody's existing UA supports UTF-8, so if you're
using UTF-8 anyway, including language tags in UTF-8 doesn't make 
the situation much worse.

Well there are lots of existing UAs that support a well-known subset of
UTF-8 :-). Their users will indoubtedly complain when they see
gobbledegook appearing. But that is just a fact of life (or will be) :-( .

However, when _real_ UTF-8 agents start to appear, they will support only
a subset of the available characters sets. And in particular, many will
not recognise the RFC 2482 stuff. So you get more users complaining about
more gobbledegook.

I think the real point is that inclusion of language information is a MAY.
You do not include it because you have bought this nice new toy that
allows it, or because the latest Billyware does it by default. You use it
when there are useful clues which could indeed be helpful to displays which
know about that particular language. Which means you will hardly ever need
to use it for the language EN.

I imagine that lots of clients will fail to include the language
tags -- and that's probably better than insisting that the clients
include tags which they're likely to get wrong.  the main thing
is to make sure there's a provision for language tags.

Yes, that sounds about right.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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