Re: customMediaType-2: RFC 3023 flawed?

> RFC 3023 recommends supplying a charset header for
> both application/xml and text/xml.  I think the TAG and
> W3C should take a slightly different stand.  I'm fine
> with text/xml, except for
>
> (a) I'd strengthen it to MUST, since the default (US-ASCII)
>     is almost certainly always wrong, and

I like the idea.  On the other hand, many people have ignored
such recommendation.  Even if we adopt this change, will the
real world change?

> (b) I'd give serious consideration to deprecating text/xml
>     and text/*+xml

I agree.  Having learned how MIME people feel about text/*, I have
come to think that text/* is inappropriate for XML.  On the other
hand, I think many people will use text/something anyway, even 
if text/xml had not been registered from the beginning.

> 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.

I think that this approach is ad-hoc, as I have discussed in [1].
Further discussion about this issue should probably be done in the
I18N WG.

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2002Feb/0000.html

--
MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given) <EB2M-MRT@asahi-net.or.jp>

Received on Thursday, 14 February 2002 03:29:27 UTC