Re: Feedback on "Offline Web Applications" (Editor's Draft 17 November 2007)

On Nov 19, 2007, at 10:31, Julian Reschke wrote:

> Henri Sivonen wrote:
>>> That may be true, but then take that to the relevant standards  
>>> body, instead of simply violating a spec on purpose. This seems to  
>>> follow a pattern of "we ignore what the specs do, we can do  
>>> better" with which I Strongly disagree.
>>>
>>> If a base spec needs fixes, fix it.
>> I'm all for someone fixing the RFC, but in the interim it isn't  
>> productive to pretend that the RFC properly defined what needs to  
>> be implemented to get useful software.
>
> OK, so what exactly is the problem we're talking about? Line ends,  
> default encoding, or not allowing other encodings?

All of the above.

>>> If you don't like the defaults for a text/* format, use  
>>> application/*.
>> Has the migration from text/xml to application/xml been a  
>> productive use of humanity's resources? Wouldn't it have been more  
>> productive to redefine text/xml to have the same rules as  
>> application/xml, which is what non-validator apps have to implement  
>> anyway?
>
> I don't see how this is relevant here as the spec defines a new MIME  
> type (well, actually it doesn't; it just gives it a name; defining a  
> MIME type is a bit more work).

I suppose the new format could use application/*, but it is very sad  
that the IETF de jure notion of text/* doesn't match the  
implementation practice for text-based Web formats.

>>> Did anybody consider how well this works with existing language  
>>> libraries for reading text streams?
>> This approach works great with e.g. the readLine method in Java  
>> BufferedReader:
>> http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/io/BufferedReader.html#readLine()
>
> But not with things like InputStreamReader, right?

InputStreamReader is not for line-based input. To do line-based input,  
the InputStreamReader is supposed to be wrapped in a BufferedReader.

> So sorry, I still believe that the requirement to support single CRs  
> introduces completely useless complexity. (As the introduction of a  
> new text-based format anyway.)


So when someone *does* use CR for line breaks, what would you expect  
UAs to do?

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Monday, 19 November 2007 12:16:58 UTC