* John Cowan wrote:
[A]nd even if they did, this would cause interoperability
problems with file systems and protocols which do not provide such
means. If you transfer the document using FTP to your web server the
information is lost and the document will break.
No worse than today's situation, and FTP could be enhanced or abandoned
in favor of HTTP PUT.
RFC 1342 is eleven years old and I would still see replies containing
Bj<garbage>rn H<garbage>hrmann if I made use of its features.
*You* are suggesting that every text file format that has ever existed --
innumerable assembly languages, C, C++, Java, Fortran, Lisp, Scheme, Prolog,
Perl, Python, Smalltalk, awk, sed, ... sh, csh, bash, zsh, ... mail archives,
news archives, ... Tex, LaTex, nroff/troff, ... -- be revised to find someplace
to stuff a charset indication, and then that every one of the billions of
documents in each of those formats be changed to carry that information.
No. I said that I consider formats that leave implementations to guess
how to process instances of the format broken as designed. I did not
suggest to fix them. And by the way, some formats you mention are binary
and not text formats and could thus not make use of file system encoding
information.