Unknown text/* subtypes (was: Request for review of Turtle (an RDFserialization) media type: text/turtle)

[Martin Duerst]

At 00:45 07/12/19, Frank Ellermann wrote:
>Julian Reschke wrote:
> 
>> there's also RFC2616
>
>Yes, that's an ugly legacy exception...  
> 
>> <http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/1.1/rfc2616bis/issues/#i20>
>
>...maybe 2616bis can drop this oddity in favour of a simple
>"unknown text is ASCII" rule.

The new version of the HTTP spec, 2616bis, should definitely
drop the iso-8859-1 default, but NOT in favor of "unknown text is ASCII".
It should just say that there is no default.
There is a big difference between these two, especially
for document formats that contain internal 'charset' information.
A default of US-ASCII makes document-internal 'charset' information
useless (because the external information wins). No default means
that the recipient will look at the internal information.

>HTTP oddities shouldn't affect
>MIME registrations, there's no string "2616" in BCP13.

One reason for the problems with text/xml was that the
original MIME default of US-ASCII was enforced. This made
it impossible to serve XML documents with internal 'charset'
information only as text/xml.

Regards,    Martin.


#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp