Re: Last Call comments on P3P from I18N WG/IG

On reading through our comments on the P3P specification, I thought of 
another problem with the current requirement to use UTF-8.

The P3P specification allows the use of HTML meta elements embedded in 
HTML content.  Each HTML document has a single character encoding.  It 
follows that the P3P content inside the meta elements has to be encoded 
in the same way as the remainder of the HTML document.  Presumably, it 
is not the intention that P3P's meta mechanism be usable only with HTML 
documents encoded using UTF-8.

Misha

[This mail was written using voice recognition software]


>Character Encoding
>------------------
>
>- The spec says (http://www.w3.org/TR/P3P/#Policies) that policies
>   must be encoded in UTF-8.
>
>   From an i18n point of view, this looks very nice, because UTF-8
>   covers the widest range of languages, and this clear single choice
>   will avoid various interoperability problems such as negotiation
>   on HTTP Accept-Charset and decoding of unknown 'charset's.
>
>   However, we would also like to make you aware of the fact that
>   this spec is one of the first that specifies 'UTF-8 only',
>   and in some environments, this will need some effort from
>   implementors. It is also in some way against the XML spec
>   because that requires that an XML processor accept both UTF-8
>   and UTF-16.
>
>   We have given you the arguments for both sides, but in this
>   case, we cannot decide for you. We request you to check this
>   requirement with people working on implementations, e.g.
>   in Japan. If they feel fine with it or have implemented it,
>   this can be left as is. If not, it should be changed to say
>   that policies are transmitted as any other XML documents,
>   with encoding according to RFC 2376. In that case, the potential
>   of the same policy being served in different character encodings
>   also has to be considered; this is easier than policies being
>   served in different languages because conversion is mechanical.
>   [Should you need technical assistance to verify implementations,
>    please feel free to contact us.]
>   [The 'UTF-8 only' rule may be a leftover from the time when
>    the plan was to stuff policies into a HTTP header. In that
>    case, using only a single encoding would definitely have been
>    very important to avoid protocol complications.]


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Received on Wednesday, 22 March 2000 08:29:52 UTC