Re: Revised proposal for UTF-16

[erik@netscape.com (Erik van der Poel)]

Dan Kegel wrote:
> 
> In the case of HTTP headers, we can probably consider the
> entire HTTP header stream as a single message, and only require
> the BOM at the beginning of the stream, e.g. the client and server
> would each send the BOM as the first two bytes after opening the
> socket.

No, HTTP headers are always encoded with one octet per character, even
if the body is UCS-2 or UCS-4 (or UTF-16). You would have
interoperability problems if you tried to send the headers themselves in
UTF-16. A client could only send UTF-16 headers if it knew beforehand
that the server could deal with it.

For example, if the link that the user clicked on had an HREF with
"whttp://...";, where "whttp" is some new protocol that accepts UTF-16,
then the client could safely send UTF-16 headers.

(Note: I'm not proposing to create a new protocol called whttp. I'm just
saying that the current HTTP cannot deal with UTF-16 headers.)

Erik