Re: Revised proposal for UTF-16

[Dan Kegel <dank@alumni.caltech.edu>]

Right, I was thinking of a hypothetical future protocol 
like http or smtp but based on UTF-16, not the current http or smtp.
- Dan

At 08:33 AM 5/31/98 -0700, Erik van der Poel wrote:
>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
>
>
>