[Zope3-Users] Re: Unicode for Stupid Americans (like me)?

[Paul Winkler]

On Wed, Feb 28, 2007 at 02:06:39PM -0700, Jeff Shell wrote:
> On 2/28/07, Philipp von Weitershausen <philipp at weitershausen.de> wrote:
> >That's sorta what zope.publisher does. Actually, it figures that if the
> >browser sends an Accept-Charset header, the stuff that its sending to us
> >would be encoded in one of those encodings, so it tries the ones in
> >Accept-Charset until it's lucky. It falls back to UTF-8.
> >
> >This seems to work. But yeah, it's relying on implementation details of
> >the browser and it's weird.
> 
> Ugh. I don't know how I missed that header. I was always looking for a
> content-type on the post, hoping that it had the information.

I'm rather late to this particular party, and I'm far from an expert
on either unicode or HTTP, but I have to ask: Is it just me, or is
HTTP's support for specifying encodings completely inadequate?

As far as I can tell, there are only two relevant headers.  The
request may specify Accept-Charset, whose meaning is given as "what
character sets are acceptable for the *response*" (emphasis mine).
The response may specify Content-Type, which again is irrelevant to
the request.  If there's anything that allows the client to specify
the encoding in use *for the request data*, I don't see it.

That seems like quite an oversight to make as late as HTTP 1.1 (1999).
What am I missing?


-PW


-- 

Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com