Rough sketch for an I-D (a successor of RFC 3023)

Here is a rough sketch.  Having presented this sketch, I ask the TAG to 
reconsider its decision to publish an I-D that updates RFC 3023.  It
would be nice if somebody from W3C (probably some member of I18N WG or
XML Core WG?) can help me.  I think that further discussion about the
content of this I-D should be moved to the IETF-XML-MIME ML.

By the way, I cannot find image/svg+xml in the IANA list and cannot find an I-D. 
I find an I-D for application/rdf+xml, but no RFC yet.

1) deprecate text/xml, text/xml-external-parsed-entity, and text/*+xml 

- the MIME canonical form with short lines delimited by CR-LF, making 
  UTF-16 and UTF-32 impossible

- Casual users will be embarrassed if XML is displayed as text, while 
  experts can certainly save and then browse XML documents.  

- Worries that the absence of the charset parameter of
  text/xml and text/*+xml is particularly harmful, since the
  default of that parameter is US-ASCII

2) the optional charset parameter is RECOMMENDED if and
   only if the value is guaranteed to be correct

- Server implementers or Server Managers SHOULD NOT specify the
  default value of the charset
  parameter of text/xml, application/xml,
  Text/xml-external-parsed-entity,
  Application/xml-external-parsed-entity, */*+xml, or
  Application/xml-dtd, unless they can guarantee that 
  that default value is correct for all MIME entities of these media
  types.

3) Fragment identifier

At present, RFC 3023 says:

	As of today, no established specifications define identifiers
	for XML media types. However, a working draft published by
	W3C, namely "XML Pointer Language (XPointer)", attempts to
	define fragment identifiers for text/xml and
	application/xml. The current specification for XPointer is
	available at http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr.

We have XPointer recommendations but are not ready to bless 
XPointer.  We should say so.

4) Possible reasons for not providing the charset parameter for specialized 
   media types

I think that "This media type is utf-8 only and thus does not need any
mechanism to identify the charset" is a perfectly good reason, since
"UTF-8 only" is a generic principle.  This should be mentioned in the
I-D.

5) Needs a real example for the +xml convention.

Application/soap+xml should be mentioned in Section 8 (Examples).

6) Update References 

Reference to three XPointer recommendations without blessing them as 
fragment identifiers of XML media types.

Reference to MathML Version 2 rather than MathML Version 1.1

Reference to Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1

Although XML 1.1 is not a recommendation yet, I think that we should
mention it and say "It is very likely that XML 1.1 will reference to
this document".

7) New Appendix: Changes from RFC 3023

We need a summary of these changes 
-- 
MURATA Makoto <murata@hokkaido.email.ne.jp>

Received on Wednesday, 29 October 2003 11:28:00 UTC