- From: Simon Perreault <simon.perreault@viagenie.ca>
- Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2008 09:38:40 -0400
- To: HTTP Working Group <ietf-http-wg@w3.org>
Hi Mark, On Tuesday 25 March 2008 09:15:38 Mark Nottingham wrote: > * 1. Should HTTPBIS continue to accommodate historical clients that > assume that an unlabeled text/* type is iso-8859-1, rather than MIME's > default ASCII? Following your comment on a related issue in the vcarddav WG, I investigated and came to the conclusion that MIME doesn't specify that text/* has a default character set of ASCII. I may very well be wrong, and this email is also a way to ask you for clarifications. I see the definition of the charset parameter in RFC 2046, section 4.1.2. It seems specific to text/plain, not text/*. A critical parameter that may be specified in the Content-Type field for "text/plain" data is the character set. It is also mentioned that other text/* types may not even have the charset parameter. So a default value would be meaningless. The specification for any future subtypes of "text" must specify whether or not they will also utilize a "charset" parameter, and may possibly restrict its values as well. What I understand from this section is that there is no default character set for text/*.
Received on Tuesday, 25 March 2008 13:39:14 UTC