Please review the attached patch. It changes the default charset for set_content_type() to None. If HTTPResponse.charset is None then the charset parameter of the Content-Type header will not be specified. If you think it is less surprising, we can make the 'charset' argument to set_content_type() a required parameter. The other change is to add quixote.DEFAULT_HTTP_CHARSET and quixote.DEFAULT_STR_CHARSET. DEFAULT_HTTP_CHARSET is nice because it provides a single place to set the default encoding that Quixote uses. DEFAULT_STR_CHARSET is for insanepeople who think that str instances should contain encoded character data. Also, people who use unicode can set it to 'ascii' and ensure that http_response._decode_string() always returns unicode strings. Neil