Re: B.1 and B.2 results

At 6:20 PM 10/18/96, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
>Yes, but from what Aladdin's cave does this information come from when it
>becomes time to transmit the data?  Does the XML document get stored with a
>complete MIME header, is it maintained in some registry, is some extension
>to the filename used, or does the webserver autodetect, or does the
>webserver guess based on its own locale and OS, or what?

It's the webserver's business. If people don't like the standard HTTP
header directories, or server extension configurations, they can use the
"self-detecting character hacks" (the PI).

   Parsers, on the other hand are what we are specifying. And parsers only
need to say what they do given some input. We can define a "metadata
channel" -- additional input to the parser, determined as reasonable; we
will provide two bindings: Command line option, for command-line parsers,
and HTTP header policies for HTTP stream parsers. Other channels will have
to define how they will transmit or use meta-data, as appropriate. If they
don't have meta-data, they can use the hack.
>
>I think the most practical thing is for the XML rules to state that it is
>the Webserver software's task to figure out the encoding (given that most
>sites this can be done from locale and OS, or from configuration files on
>a per file or per directory basis) but allow an override for documents
>that use some other encoding, in the form of PIs (that keep SGML
>compatibility). Character set should be an website administrator's task,
>not any business of Hiroshi Homepage (let alone Heinrich Heimblatt), as
>far as possible.
XML is not defining server behavior, but client behavior. The server will
have two options: metadata, or PI. We should declare that metadata is
preferred over PI, if the channel provides metadata.

>In other words: SGML markup for storage, Web protocols for interchange.

This falls out of my proposal, if that's the way the server wants to work:
no metatdata in, but metadata required to go out because HTTP has the
metadata channel.

   -- David

RE delenda est.

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Received on Friday, 18 October 1996 11:07:25 UTC