- From: Francois Yergeau <FYergeau@alis.com>
- Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2002 14:56:13 -0400
- To: ietf-charsets@iana.org
Martin Duerst wrote: > At 15:35 02/10/03 +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote: > > Receivers MAY recognize and remove the BOM in larger, usually > > labeled, pieces of text (e.g. MIME entities), if it requires > > compability with software that generates it. Care should be taken > > to not remove BOM in data that must be preserved correctly (such as > > digitally signed data). > > I think this is fine. Regards, Martin. I have three problems with the above: 1) It tells receivers what to do, whereas it should (IMHO) tell protocols what to tell receivers to do. 2) It says 'remove the BOM' whereas 'ignore' is usually a safer course of action. 3) It talks about 'compability with software that generates it'. As receivers do not generally know what software generates the stuff they get (does your browser what editor created the page it's looking at?), this is meaningless. Furthermore, it seems to me that pegging behaviour on knowledge of the identity of other software is pretty much at odds with the idea of Internet standards: all you should need to know to interoperate is what standard(s) that other software conforms to. I'm OK with the last sentence, but such language is already in the draft: "Note that such stripping might affect an external process at a different layer (such as a digital signature or a count of the characters) that is relying on the presence of all characters in the stream. " -- François
Received on Friday, 4 October 2002 14:57:29 UTC