[webkit-dev] HTML5 & Web Links (RFC 5988)

[Alex Milowski]

On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 6:01 PM, Alexey Proskuryakov <ap at 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