Re: customMediaType-2: RFC 3023 flawed?

On Mon, 2002-02-04 at 20:48, Tim Bray wrote: 
> As regards application/xml, application/*+xml, I think 3023
> is probably wrong and we should take stand that the server
> SHOULD NOT send a charset header because 
> 
> (a) there's no transcoding, so the in-band signaling 
>     mechanisms of XML work just fine, and so
> (b) the recipient will have a much higher chance in almost
>     every case than the server of getting the encoding
>     right.

As long as as that's SHOULD NOT, not MUST NOT, I can probably cope, but
I'll admit to worrying that we've not seen the end of encoding debates. 
The prospect of encodings which complicate sniffing out the XML
declaration (if one is even present - common practice, alas, often omits
it even when required) does bother me for the long term.  EBCDIC may yet
have cousins.
 
-- 
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com

Received on Thursday, 7 February 2002 13:19:55 UTC