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Posted by Alan J. Flavell on January 11, 2006, 7:00 pm
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On Wed, 11 Jan 2006, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> chernyshevsky@hotmail.com wrote:
>
> > IE to encode characters outside of the current code-page
> > as HTML entities?
>
> You cannot force such grossly incorrect behavior.
Well, in as much as behaviour in this situation isn't defined, it's
hard to say that it's "incorrect", but it's certainly
counter-intuitive, and I'd rate it as distinctly sub-optimal, because
the results are ambiguous.
But over and above that, I would criticise the specification writers
for failing to grasp the fact that you can't prevent users from
submitting whatever characters they care to paste into the submission
fields: they should have made some kind of unambiguous provision for
what ought to happen in that case. I've seen at least two unambiguous
ways that it *could* be done (or "could have been done" if the
spec-writers had got there first) - but it seems too late to remedy
that now.
> You just need to be prepared to getting form data encoded that way,
> from IE and perhaps other browsers as well.
That's the reality of it, indeed.
> If you wish to be prepared to getting arbitrary character data (as a
> form designer should be, right?), make the page containing the form
> UTF-8 encoded. Browsers will then send the data in UTF-8 format
> (though of course, some old browsers may fail to do this - but there
> is little hope with them anyway).
Based on the observation that search services like Google have been
doing this for a couple of years already, it seems that they, at
least, rate this as practically feasible nowadays. Though they might
still have a fallback if they detect that NN4.* is calling (NN4.*
versions are quite capable of *rendering* utf-8, generally speaking:
and they indicate that capability in their Accept-charset header, but
when it comes to submitting utf-8 data, they get it horribly wrong).
thanks for the cite. I think it says everything else I could want to
add on the topic...
cheers
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