Re: Warnings, RFC 1522, and ISO-8859-1

Francois Yergeau:
>
>À 23:58 17-12-96 +0100, Koen Holtman a écrit :
>>The Montreal IETF took place *after* the end of the last call.
>
>I'm afraid not. The deadline was July 5th, see
><http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/hypermail/1996q2/thread.html>.

Oops, seems you are right.  I distincly remember the IESG itself planning to
end the last call before the Montreal IETF, so I don't know where that date
came from.

[...]
>>I don't think you can take advantage of the language above.  The magic words
>>are "that does not represent a change in overall function of the
>>specification".  Changing the charset defaults _would_ represent a change in
>>the overall function of the specification.
>
>Let's review my 4 points in this light:
>
>1) (Default entity charset is Latin-1) This is plain wrong, various clients
>assume other defaults depending on their users needs.

These various clients are 1.0 clients.  

The definition of the 1.1 default can't be `plain wrong' because some 1.0
clients use other defaults.  We are dealing with a normative statement for
1.1 here, not with a description of best current practice.  Such a normative
statement can only be wrong if it leads to an internal contradiction in the
draft.

>2) (All clients support Latin-1) This is not true,

Same reply as 1).  Note that 1.1 does not _require_ all 1.1 clients to
implement Latin-1, it only requires them to find it acceptable even if they
only partially implement it.

>3&4) (Latin-1 and English defaults for Warning:) Since the text is not
>processed by the protocol (only the numeric code), the functionning would
>not be impacted by changing the defaults to something sensible (like UTF-8
>and None).

The text is processed when the 99 code is used, and clients are free to
process the text when seeing other codes as well.  So changing the defaults
does have an impact.

One final remark:  I have the feeling this thread is going in circles.  I'll
try to stop sending responses.

>François Yergeau <yergeau@alis.com>

Koen.

Received on Wednesday, 18 December 1996 15:49:48 UTC