Re: Database To Web Browser

From: Otto Stolz (Otto.Stolz@uni-konstanz.de)
Date: Tue Feb 05 2002 - 07:46:27 EST


Michael (michka) Kaplan wrote:

> The @CODEPAGE directive or Session.CodePage property must be set

> to 1251 for cyrillic text to properly be sent from ASP code to

> the browser.

Why only that one? What about ISO-8859-5, KOI8-R, CP 855, or UTF-8,
to name only a few popular ones of the myriad of encodings for
cyrillic text? Cf. <http://czyborra.com/charsets/cyrillic.html>.

So, the programmer has to consider the following questions:

- In which encoding shall I keep my own data?
   (henceforth: "Reference encoding")

- In which encoding shall I present my WWW page to the reader's browser?

- How can I convert my reference encoding to the encoding for the browser?
   This one is answered above, I guess.

- How do I inform the browser of the encoding I have chosen?
   This one is easy: cf.
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/charset.html#h-5.2.2>.

- In which encoding will the browser report the user's entries to my
   script, either server-side (GGI, PHP), or client-side (Java, Javascript)?

- Can the user choose another encoding than I have proposed, and if so,
   how can my script determine the encoding chosen?

- How can my script convert the user's input to my reference encoding?

I really do not know the answer to most of these questions, and I'd be
happy to learn about them. (In particular pertaining to HTML forms and
server-side PHP scripts).

Best wishes,
   Otto Stolz



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