Re: internet media types and encoding

Rick Jelliffe wrote:
> Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org>
> 
>>- request a modification the +XML media type registration to state that
>>encoding information MUST NOT be supplied by the server unless it is
>>known to be correct and agrees with any internal encoding information
>>in the content.
> 
> IIRC the extra thing to keep in mind is Japanese dumb transcoding proxies,
> which may transcode text/* without rewriting the headers. AFAIK
> they are the only thing that may make it desirable to favour any explicit
> MIME header charset over the XML encoding PI.   Maybe some
> Japanese expert can comment on whether they are still a factor to
> be considered. 

Of course the real point here is that if you're a web server and you 
fish something of type */*+xml off the disk, PLEASE don't insert a 
guessed-at charset.

As regards the transcoders, that problem could also be made to go away 
by deprecating text/*xml, which we should do anyway.
-- 
Cheers, Tim Bray
         (ongoing fragmented essay: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/)

Received on Tuesday, 8 April 2003 12:03:08 UTC