Is server software actually obliged to perform such conversions on request? Surely, rather, browsers should be expected to support a certain minimum set of encodings, or else it should be left to the content provider and the reader and/or their software to agree on something acceptable. After all, if someone in China sends me snail mail, the mail carrier is not under any obligation to translate it for me. On the contrary, I would be offended if they tried, without my explicit permission, on the basis that the content of the letter is none of their business. I need to agree with the sender to send it in English rather than Chinese, or else get it translated myself.The last agent handling the document would be the mail carrier.No, however if I receive a letter in the post written in German I'm going to ask someone to translate it rather than try to cope with a language (c.f. encoding) I don't understand.
Does the mail carrier have the right to open the mailing and
replace your document with garbage?
Unlike Jame's cup of wine, this really is a good analogy. Suppose the document is stored on the server in ISO 8859-1 and the browser requesting the page understands only EBCDIC. The server must convert it -- if it doesn't, it will appear on the client as complete garbage. As Jon mentioned, the server is the last one to touch it, and this illustrates why it is appropriate for the server to touch it.
Peter
In any case, I would assume that any in practice any browser can at least understand ASCII, and if presented with a page in UTF-8 will at worst display 0020-007F correctly and the rest as some kind of mojibake. And if it can't understand any other script in UTF-8, chances are it can't understand whatever the coding it is presented with, so there is little gained by converting it to some specific code page.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
