[Python-Dev] urllib.quote and unquote - Unicode issues

[Matt Giuca]

> This POV is way too browser-centric...
>

This is but one example. Note that I found web forms to be the least
clear-cut example of choosing an encoding. Most of the time applications
seem to be using UTF-8, and all the standards I have read are moving towards
specifying UTF-8 (from being unspecified). I've never seen a standard
specify or even recommend Latin-1.

Where web forms are concerned, basically setting the form accept-charset or
the page charset is the *maximum amount* of control you have over the
encoding. As you say, it can be encoded by another page or the user can
override their settings. Then what can you do as the server? Nothing ...
there's no way to predict the encoding. So you just handle the cases you
have control over.

5) Different cultures do not choose necessarily between latin-1 and utf-8.
> They deal more with things like, say KOI8-R or Big5.


Exactly. This is exactly my point - Latin-1 is arbitrary from a standards
point of view. It's just one of the many legacy encodings we'd like to
forget. The UTFs are the only options which support all languages, and UTF-8
is the only ASCII-compatible (and therefore URI-compatible) encoding. So we
should aim to support that as the default.

Besides all that and without any offense: "most proper" and "should do" and
> the implication that all web browsers behave the same way are not a good
> location to argue from when talking about implementing a standard ;)


I agree. However if there *was* a proper standard we wouldn't have to argue!
"Most proper" and "should do" is the most confident we can be when dealing
with this standard, as there is no correct encoding.

Does anyone have a suggestion which will be more compatible with the rest of
the world than allowing the user to select an encoding, and defaulting to
"utf-8"?
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