Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 06/22/07 20:23

Scripsit tobes:

> The accept-charset looks interesting, although I do believe that it
> will screw things up. I bet it doesn't even convert between encodings,
> and just sticks question marks in where a character code doesn't fit?

It used to be ignored by browsers, and still might, but when supported, it
makes the browser convert the form data to the specified encoding - if
possible. It might be impossible because the browser does not know that
encoding, or because there are characters in the data that are not
representable in it. Browsers may then even throw in &#number; designations!

I don't think accept-charset is a useful approach here.

> But yes, based on what you've said it does seem that the server side
> checking would be the only "real" way of seeing if input is typed in
> the correct character set at least. I think I can avoid this though,
> and convince the cleint to handle this by just *asking* users to enter
> details in English, we'll see!

Let's hope that will work.

> Where do you get your HTML knowledge from, I could do with reading up
> a bit more :)

Unfortunately the book on HTML that I have co-authored (and is the best book
available on HTML) is in Finnish only. :-( But the encoding issues,
including those relating to web pages, are discussed in my book "Unicode
Explained", published by O'Reilly last year.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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