Re: Unknown text/* subtypes [i20]

Geoffrey Sneddon wrote:
> 
> 
> On 12 Feb 2008, at 14:03, Julian Reschke wrote:
> 
>> HTTP/1.1 recipients MUST respect the charset label provided by the 
>> sender; and those user agents that have a provision to "guess" a 
>> charset MUST use the charset from the content-type field if they 
>> support that charset, rather than the recipient's preference, when 
>> initially displaying a document.
> 
> Does this mean using US-ASCII for text/xml without an explicit charset? 

It means whatever the other specifications say about that (e.g., RFC2046 
and RFC3023).

> I read it as meaning so (as by omitting it you have implicitly sent a 
> US-ASCII charset label).

Yes. So HTTP/1.1 doesn't specify a default anymore, but there are 
defaults specified somewhere else.

> If you really want to require such a thing it is worth noting that it is 
> extremely unlikely that any major HTTP implementation will actually 
> abide by what 2616bis requires (therefore making the major 
> implementations non-conforming). Do you really want to write a spec. 
> with  couple of academic/experimental implementations, and nothing else? 
> Surely it'd be more useful to specify HTTP in such a way that the major 
> implementations can actually abide by the specification (while meeting 
> market demands)?

Did you follow the long discussion leading to this change?

The reason we are making a change is that user agents indeed do *not* do 
what RFC2616 said. Thus we're removing that specific requirement. IMHO.

BR, Julian