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ACNS has decided to make a change to the configuration of the www.msu.edu
web servers.  These servers house MSU's main web site and also personal and
departmental web sites in AFS space with www.msu.edu/user/netid URLs.  

On Thursday, July 14, at approximately 8:00am, the server configuration will
be changed so that it no longer forces the ISO-8859-1 character set to be
used.  This will allow different default character sets to be specified in
web browsers, and also in the HTML code of web pages in AFS.  The benefit of
this is that AFS users will now be able to specify Unicode or other
non-English or special character sets in their web documents.

We have tested MSU's web site under the new configuration and have
determined that the change will have no visible effect.  It is possible,
however, that some users will see changes when viewing documents in AFS
personal/departmental sites.  In almost all instances, the web browser will
supply a reasonable default character set.  Any undesirable effects may be
corrected by specifying a default character set in the web browser or in the
HTML document.

This was brought to our attention by a student who wanted to use UTF-8 to
support Chinese characters in his AFS web site.