Re: Charsets revisited
Gavin Nicol (gtn@ebt.com)
Thu, 25 Jan 1996 09:19:43 -0500
>If the transformation is performed on the fly then equivilance is presumed
>from the transformation algorithims used. It is interesting that the
>algorithims to be used are not necessarily specified by the standard. For
>example ISO8859-5 to Unicode. The Unicode Consortium publishes a set of
>tables which I would recommend we consdier to be 'the standard' but other,
>disputed, conversion tables have been seen, especially for ideographic based
>writing systems.
There will be at least one server appearing in the near future that
supports encoding conversion on the fly, based on the Accept-Charset
headers. The same ideas can be applied to languages (and ideed, I
notice that there are translation and transliteration servers starting
to appear at last; something I predicted more than a year ago).
Sa Brian explain so well: content negotiation is vital for mapping the
abstract to the concrete.