# Re: http charset labelling

dupuy@cs.columbia.edu
Fri, 9 Feb 1996 17:35:08 -0500

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    Date: Fri, 9 Feb 1996 17:35:08 -0500

    Message-Id: <9602092235.AA18323@just.smarts.com>

    To: mohta@necom830.cc.titech.ac.jp, gtn@ebt.com

    Subject: Re: http charset labelling

    From: dupuy@cs.columbia.edu

Gavin wrote:
> >> Nor should there be. People map from a glyph to a *character*, which
> >> is quite different to a character code. I have enough trouble mapping
> >> some glyphs to characters.

Masataka replied:
> >Then, why do you think you can force people to perform the
> >troublesome mapping?

Gavin replied:
> I'm not proposing to force anyone to do anything, but rather, simply
> give them a choice. You *are* trying to force people to use a
> non-natural representation.

You're giving them a choice between using a "non-natural" representation which
will always work, and using a "natural" representation which may not work in
some cases, e.g. in Greece where a user might enter a Greek A rather than a
Latin A when typing in a URL from a business card.

The convenience of extended character set for URL may outweigh the
inconvenience of less reliable ability to type them in from printed
representation. But, we should be aware of this tradeoff if we decide to make
it. This is Masataka's point, which you seem to be missing.

Note that this issue of duplicated code points is independent of the code
mapping issue; unless code mapping is dealt with, extended character set URLs
are unlikely to work in many cases when typing them in from printed
representation. There have been a few proposals for dealing with code
mapping; I'm not totally convinced that they all of them will work well in
practice with existing browsers that are unaware of character codes.

@alex

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