> Does anyone know the historical justification for charset negotiation in the first place? Back in the Old Days (say, 1995), each OS (family) would have its o

> Does anyone know the historical justification for charset negotiation in the first place? Back in the Old Days (say, 1995), each OS (family) would have its own variant of 'Extended ASCII': Unix had Latin-1, Windows had its own encoding mostly compatible with Latin-1, and Macintosh computers had Mac OS Roman, aka MacRoman or just macintosh. It's possible to convert most, say, French texts from any of these to any other without losing anything, but if you don't the other person will have garbage on their end. In theory, if a client said it could only handle a charset that didn't include some of the characters in the source document, you could do something like give them an HTML file that used images to represent what they didn't have. Or something.