New Version Notification for draft-murata-kohn-lilley-xml-03

Paul Libbrecht paul at activemath.org
Tue Sep 29 23:45:54 CEST 2009


Le 28-sept.-09 à 19:16, Chris Lilley a écrit :

>  Although listed as an optional parameter, the use of the charset
>  parameter is STRONGLY RECOMMENDED, since this information can be
>  used by XML processors to determine authoritatively the charset of
>  the XML MIME entity.

First let me note that the "strongly recommended" does not appear to  
me about the charset, only "recommended" as per the first line of  
section 3.2.

And it's good so. Indeed, two practical arguments discourage it:
- too many tools (MSIE in particular) compare media-types by strings  
(and indeed, a richer comparison may be not fully defined)
- the normal "static file serving" practice of most web-servers (in  
particular Apache HTTPD) has a very hard time to guess the proper  
charset unless you fiddle in the configurations hence guesses often  
wrong

I know, however, of no XML parsers that is unable to successfully  
exploit an XML character set encoding header.

> The charset parameter can also be used to provide protocol-specific  
> operations, such as charset-based content negotiation in HTTP.

thanks for this document. I would love to see it leap forward into an  
IETF RFC !

paul
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