RE: Comments on draft-yergeau-rfc2279bis-00.txt

At 14:56 02/10/04 -0400, Francois Yergeau wrote:
>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.

Please feel free to reword, but keep in mind that we should have
something that is extremely easy for protocol designers to use.


>2) It says 'remove the BOM' whereas 'ignore' is usually a safer course of
>action.

Please feel free to reword.

>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 would remove that clause. Recipients MAY, and they will figure
the conditions out by themselves.

>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. "

I think that text should be moved to be close to the normative stuff.
Quite a bit of the rest of the bom chapter could actually be shortened/
tightened a bit.


Regards,   Martin.

Received on Saturday, 5 October 2002 02:17:08 UTC