why the % cruft?

[Lars Knoll]

> On Monday 08 July 2002 03:53 am, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > One of my biggest problems with Konqueror is it's usage of % stuff for
> > non latin-1 while other browsers (MSIE, Galeon/Mozilla) doesn't seem to
> > have this problem..
> >
> > I understand that this was due to QT-2 lack of Unicode support, but we're
> > using QT-3 now (at least I think that why the % was, unless I'm wrong),
> > and it's very hard to use Konq. URL's with this - specially when you put
> > a URL with non latin-1 chars...
>
> URLs are spec'ed as a sequence of octets (8-bit values) "Unicode URLs"
> basically don't exist. Despite that we try to handle them anyway and
> appearantly that doesn't always work. (E.g. we need to convert unicode to
> an 8 bit sequence before we can tranfer it to the website but the encoding
> to use for that is unspecified, so we can only guess.)

As Dirk already pointed out, IE sends URLS in utf8 by default. I'm pretty sure 
we could do the same without breaking a lot of web pages (they'd be broken 
with IE aswell). Maybe there's an HTTP header field we can set to indicate 
this?

Cheers,
Lars