Media Type "text/csv": new draft (-02) and Last Call

[Graham Klyne]

At 11:15 22/02/05 -0500, Yakov Shafranovich wrote:

>I posted a new draft (-02) with minor ABNF corrections. The new draft can 
>be found in the IETF repository:
>
>http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-shafranovich-mime-csv-02.txt

Reviewing this version...

(I'm currently using this format to process genomic data from MS Excel 
spreadsheets, so some comments are based on my own code.)

I feel compelled to ask the question:  should this really be a text/csv 
type rather than application/csv?  Past comments by Ned Freed with respect 
to text/html suggest possibly not, but similarity with 
text/tab-separated-values suggests maybe yes.  I don't personally feel 
strongly about this.

Section 2:

[[
    6.  Field containing line breaks (CRLF) and commas should be enclosed
        in double-quotes.  For example:

        "aaa","b CRLF
        bb","ccc" CRLF
        zzz,yyy,xxx
]]

Are there any CSV applications that actually quote newlines in 
values?  (I'm not sure that my own CSV handling code would accept a newline 
within a quoted string)

[[
    7.  If double-quotes are used to enclosed fields, then double-quotes
        inside fields must be surrounded by double quotes.  For example:

        "aaa","b"""bb","ccc"
]]

This is NOT how Excel handles quotes, nor my own code.  Rather, when a 
quoted string contains a double-quote character, the double quote is 
doubled up.  Thus the example would be:
        "aaa","b""bb","ccc"

Section 7.1:
[[
    [3]  Postel, J., "Transmission Control Protocol", STD 7, RFC 793,
         September 1981.
]]

I think this should be an informative reference, not normative.

#g


------------
Graham Klyne
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