- From: Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org>
- Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2003 11:04:46 +0100
- To: <public-i18n-geo@w3.org>
-----Original Message----- From: w3c-i18n-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-i18n-ig-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Misha Wolf Sent: 16 September 2003 11:58 To: w3c-i18n-ig@w3.org Subject: FW: Can we revise RFC3023? fyi. Misha -----Original Message----- From: Tim Bray [mailto:tbray@textuality.com] Sent: 16 September 2003 01:16 To: Simon St.Laurent; dan@dankohn.com; murata@hokkaido.email.ne.jp; WWW-Tag Subject: Can we revise RFC3023? On the TAG telecon today, we were discussing our draft finding "Client Handling of MIME Headers" (http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/mime-respect.html), which grumbles about the contents of RFC3023 with respect to charset handling. I took an action item to ask 3023's authors if there was any chance to revise what it says about the charset parameter; I think we have fairly widespread agreement as to what needs to be done: 1. Deprecate text/* for anything that's in XML. That's because it forces the provider to provide a charset header, because in its absence the receiver is required to assume either ASCII or 8859 depending on the context, which has a very high probability of being wrong, which is irritating because if there were no charset header the client would have an excellent chance of getting it right. And forcing the server to provide a charset= is wrong; see the next point., 2. Deprecate the charset parameter for application/xml and application/*+xml. I think that Roy would like to go far as to simply outlaw it; I'd be fine with that too. The reason is that the client is almost certain to get it right, and will fail deterministically if it doesn't. For the server, on the other hand, this is really hard to get right, particularly with the introduction of various kinds of filters in modern web servers. And since the Web architecture and the XML spec says that the server's claim has to be taken as authoritative, this is really highly dysfunctional. At the very least, it should be made clear that nobody sending a media-type should send a charset for an XML media-type unless it REALLY REALLY KNOWS what it's sending, and in that case should consider not sending it anyhow. Makoto, Simon, Dan, any chance? It's going to be kind of embarrassing for TAG findings and the Webarch doc to be saying "don't do what this RFC says". -- Cheers, Tim Bray (ongoing fragmented essay: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/) --------------------------------------------------------------- - Visit our Internet site at http://www.reuters.com Get closer to the financial markets with Reuters Messaging - for more information and to register, visit http://www.reuters.com/messaging Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender specifically states them to be the views of Reuters Ltd.
Received on Friday, 19 September 2003 06:07:13 UTC