I 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 predate

I 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.