Julian Reschke wrote:
It would be nice if somebody could provide some insight why this ever made it into HTTP. Was that just an attempt to allow text/html encoded in latin1 to be served without charset parameter?
Some parts of this puzzle: RFC 2070 introduced an "ideally anything is Unicode" concept, later adopted by HTML 4+, XHTML 1+, and XML 1+. AFAIK HTML 3.2 and maybe also HTML 3 still didn't have this feature. As far as RFC numbers mean something 2070 was published "after" 2068, both say January 1997, and "the law" 2277 was clearly a year later. RFC 2068 (HTTP/1.1) was the successor of 1945 (HTTP/1.0, May 1996), 2070 (HTML i18n) was the successor of 1866 (HTML 2, November 1995). Tim Berners-Lee, one co-author of RFC 1866 and 1945, wrote in 1866: | NOTE - To support non-western writing systems, a larger character | repertoire will be specified in a future version of HTML. The | document character set will be [ISO-10646], or some subset that | agrees with [ISO-10646]; in particular, all numeric character | references must use code positions assigned by [ISO-10646]. Speculation, in May 1996 it made sense that HTTP/1.0 can transport HTML 2 "as is", default Latin-1, and it took Harald and Martin some months to fix this in RFC 2070 and 2277, too late for RFC 2068, and RFC 2616 simply inherited "default Latin-1" wholesale. Frank