Re: B.1 and B.2 results

On Thu, 17 Oct 1996, David G. Durand wrote:

>    I hate character set issues, but I have to agree with Gavin that
> explicitly ignoring the main protocol of the Web is a loser, especially
> when it has the potential for a nice solution of the problem.

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? 

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.

It should be the Webservers responsibility to detect an overriding PI at
the head of an XML document and to generate the appropriate MIME header
information for transmission. So if people need to have foreign encoded
documents on their site, they can readily mark them as such.

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



Rick Jelliffe            http://www.allette.com.au/allette/ricko
                         email: ricko@allette.com.au
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Received on Friday, 18 October 1996 05:16:00 UTC