W3C Last Call and Media Type request for comments: XQuery and XQueryX

[Liam Quin]

On Thu, Apr 07, 2005 at 10:28:58PM +0200, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
[...]
>> If an XQuery document contains an encoding declaration, it overrides the
>> default encoding specified by the MIME charset parameter.
> 
> That's inconsistent with pretty much all other media types that allow a
> charset parameter. What's the point of having a charset parameter here?

It lets people put XQuery documents on public Web servers that may
not be configured correctly.  But it's not clear that this is the
right approach.  Thank you for the comment.

>> I.5 Charset Default Rules
>> 
>> XQuery documents use the Unicode character set and, by default, the
>> UTF-8 encoding.
> 
> That's incorrect then, it defaults to the character encoding specified
> in the charset parameter (which then defaults to UTF-8).

In the MIME context that's true -- so far XQueryX has mostly (entirely?)
been used offline, where there's no charset parameter.

Thanks for spotting this.

> >I.6 Security Considerations
[...]

> Compared to http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2046.txt section 4.5.2 this seems
> very incomplete...

We expect to add to it later.  Right now the specifications are new
enough (in terms of Process) that security implications have not
all been explored.  I'd welcome help in this area.  What sort of
additional text did you expect in this section?

> >**** Registration for application/xquery+xml also at [4]
> >
> >C The application/xquery+xml Media Type (Non-Normative)
> 
> Non-Normative? Is there a normative version of this text?

It's non-normative within the context of the XQueryX specification:
an implementation does not need to support anything here in order
to claim conformance.  If you do support application/xquery+xml though,
this is how you must do it.

I hope that's clearer.  It's been difficult to see the balance between
making th documents stand alone and making them also work as part of a
larger specification.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/