4 ms·
The idea wasn't necessarily for the server to translate because back when this was invented, there was no Unicode and no UTF-8, so there might very well have be
by pilif 15y ago
The idea wasn't necessarily for the server to translate because back when this was invented, there was no Unicode and no UTF-8, so there might very well have been no way to losslessly translate.
The client would send an Accept-Charset header to tell the server what it supports and the server would send either the content in the appropriate encoding (if available) or a "406: Not Acceptable" error.
- NelsonMinar 15y agoI think Unicode predates Accept-Charset. Unicode 1.0 was published late 1991. Accept-Charset was formalized in the HTTP 1.0 RFC (1996). Usage presumably predates that, but it's not described in the HTTP 0.9 docs (which say ASCII only!) http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/AsImplemented.html http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/AsImplemented.html But what really matters is widespread acceptance of Unicode and UTF-8 and that was definitely later in coming. Thanks to dchest below for referencing a transcoding server. It's interesting the HTTP/1.0 docs characterize Accept-Encoding as a way to signal the client could handle something other than ASCII and ISO-8859-1. Google started favoring UTF-8 in search result pages somewhere around 2002 or 2003.