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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-28T16:17:47+00:00

Hi all I’ve been examining Chrome’s request headers whenever we type a URL into

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Hi all I’ve been examining Chrome’s request headers whenever we type a URL into the address bar and I was wondering what exactly does it mean by these headers:

Accept: application/xml;q=0.9
Accept-Charset: utf-8;q=0.7
Accept-Language: en;q=0.8

This thread says it’s the quality factor, so Chrome is saying it is accepting >=90% quality application/xml, >=70% quality UTF-8, and >=80% english language.

What exactly does 90% quality application/xml, 70% quality UTF-8, and 80% english language mean here?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    These headers are explained in RFC 2616.

    Accept-Charset: utf-8;q=0.7

    The key to understanding this line is that ISO-8859-1 is accepted by default even if it isn’t mentioned. The header says “I want ISO-8859-1, but I’ll accept UTF-8 if using ISO-8859-1 would degrade the quality of the object being sent by more than 30%.” I’d take this to mean that if 30% of the characters won’t fit into ISO-8859-1, then use UTF-8, but the standard doesn’t seem to require this interpretation.

    For the other examples you gave the quality factors are no-ops because there are no alternatives or defaults to preempt the definition of what’s accepted.

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