Neil Schemenauer wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 30, 2005 at 11:01:15AM +0100, Hamish Lawson wrote:
> > *If* Quixote is to adopt a policy of outputting a charset
> > parameter only for text/* types
....
> > But should Quixote adopt such a policy?
>
> If I understand the HTTP specification, it should not.

I realise I had misread your proposal and that you weren't proposing that.

> If DEFAULT_CHARSET is utf-8 or utf-16, I think it would be
> ridiculous for Quioxte to produce a Content-Type header that was
> 'image/png; charset=utf-16'.  That seems very broken to me, even if
> the clients don't care.

Specifying any charset, not just UTF-8 or UTF-16, would be just as
"ridiculous". I agree it's not ideal to include a charset parameter
when it has no meaning for the content type. How about the following?
(See also my response to "Unicode improvements".)

* if charset is explicitly specified, use that
* if charset is not specified and you have a unicode object, use UTF-8
* if charset is not specified and you have a str object and the
content type is text/* then use ISO-8959-1
* otherwise omit the charset


Hamish