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

Henri Sivonen wrote:
> On Nov 18, 2007, at 20:54, Julian Reschke wrote:
> 
>> However, *what* is defined over there ("Note: This is a willful double 
>> violation of RFC2046.") makes me nervous.
> 
> RFC 2046 was created with email legacy considerations in mind. The 
> encoding rules there are not only unhelpful but downright harmful in the 
> contemporary HTTP context with UTF-8 decoding readily available.
> 
> The Web needs a text/5 spec.

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.

If you don't like the defaults for a text/* format, use application/*.

>> (CR only as line delimiter???)
> 
> Quoting the draft:
> "Newlines must be represented by U+000A LINE FEED (LF) characters, 
> U+000D CARRIAGE RETURN (CR) characters, or U+000D CARRIAGE RETURN (CR) 
> U+000A LINE FEED (LF) pairs."

Yep, that's what I meant. Why invent a new text format that has line 
ending rules other than others? Did anybody consider how well this works 
with existing language libraries for reading text streams?

In fact, why invent a new text format at all, and not simply use an XML 
format?)

>> - "...that takes up one mebibyte of storage." -- Typo?
> 
> Not a typo but not helpful to the reader, either:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte

Interesting, but definitively not helpful for an introduction document.

BR, Julian

Received on Sunday, 18 November 2007 19:53:50 UTC