Re: Can we revise RFC3023?

* Tim Bray wrote:
>I took an action item to ask 3023's authors if there was any chance to 
>revise what it says about the charset parameter; I think we have fairly 
>widespread agreement as to what needs to be done:

This is more an education and outreach task. W3C should publish material
on these issues and talk to implementers to change their products, e.g.
to associate the .xml file name extension to application/xml in web
servers and operating systems. Revising the RFC does not change much,
especially since implementations that default to us-ascii for the
text/xml MIME type are rare and probably impractical and because people
obviously misread the RFC already:

>1. Deprecate text/* for anything that's in XML.  That's because it 
>forces the provider to provide a charset header, because in its absence 
>the receiver is required to assume either ASCII or 8859 depending on the 
>context,

No, the implementation is required to default to us-ascii, period.

>2. Deprecate the charset parameter for application/xml and 
>application/*+xml.

I disagree. XML 1.0 should be changed in a way that makes it a fatal
error if the encoding specified in the XML declaration or encoding
declaration is different from higher-level protocol encoding
information.

Received on Wednesday, 17 September 2003 18:00:23 UTC