Scope of “charset” in Content-Type HTTP header

Question

HTTP responses generated by the Pyramid web framework append ; charset=UTF-8 ; charset=UTF-8 to the Content-Type HTTP header. For example,

Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8

Section 14.17 of RFC 2616 gives an example of this:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-4

However, there's no description of the role of this charset "property". What scope does this have, and who interprets it?

Answer 1

It defines the character encoding of the entity being transferred, and can be interpreted by the remote user. Pyramid is telling everyone that it only ever talks to people in UTF-8, rather than defaulting to ISO-8859-1.