On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 6:01 PM, Alexey Proskuryakov <ap@webkit.org> wrote:
Moving or copying essential information about a document into HTTP headers is frustrating for charset declarations, why do that for anything else? With charsets, there is at least the explanation that many text formats don't have a place to declare it internally.
The charset parameter on the content-type header is more reliable than what is in the document. It also gives you a way to know how to decode the bytes into a character stream before you look into those bytes. The absence of a charset parameter requires the user agent to attempt strange things as the default character encoding for HTTP 1.1 is ISO-8859-1. In this way, it is very unlike the reservations some might have for the Link header. -- --Alex Milowski "The excellence of grammar as a guide is proportional to the paucity of the inflexions, i.e. to the degree of analysis effected by the language considered." Bertrand Russell in a footnote of Principles of Mathematics