I wrote a little test php program that has 2 identical forms. You enter text
in either form and it posts and displays the hex codes for the bytes. The
first form does not set accept-charset, so it defaults to utf-8.
The second form overrides the page encoding and sets accept-charset to
windows-1252.
http://www.xencraft.com/php/testforms.php
If you use IE, since it never honors accept-charset, both forms behave the
same and displays utf-8 byte values. On Netscape, the second form converts
the characters to windows-1252, so the characters look munged, and the
codepoints show windows1252 values.
In summary, if the accept-charset is supplied on a request, and it contains
a single encoding, we should use it as the encoding of the form.
On IE you will never see it. But other browsers that are standards compliant
(netscape was very strong in this area) will.
Do you mean, when the form element has accept-charset=xxx attribute, Netscape does: