That's right, there's no real standard way of telling a client how the URI for a GET should be encoded (and even if there is for POST, it seems most clients don't comply). However, practical experience with mainstream browsers lead to this conclusion (http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/form-i18n.html).
By now (2005) the robust way to deal with this issue is to send out forms pages encoded in utf-8, expecting the forms input to be submitted back using that encoding. This has been in practical use for a couple of years now (e.g at Google) and can be expected to work with any current HTML4-compatible browser. However, there are other browsers still in use which don't fit this description, so it still seems relevant to look at the theory and compare it with observations.

I've used this approach for several websites and it works with all the (reasonably recent) browsers I've tested.

"In theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, they never are."

In reply to Re^3: How do I know what encoding was used for form input? by itub
in thread How do I know what encoding was used for form input? by ehdonhon

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