Re: Can we revise RFC3023?

* Tim Bray wrote:
>>>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.
>
>Roy and TimBL tell me that in the case of HTTP it defaults to 8859-1.  I 
>haven't checked but they're unlikely to be wrong.

RFC 3023, section 3.1:

  ...
  Conformant with [RFC2046], if a text/xml entity is received with
  the charset parameter omitted, MIME processors and XML processors
  MUST use the default charset value of "us-ascii"[ASCII].  In cases
  where the XML MIME entity is transmitted via HTTP, the default
  charset value is still "us-ascii".
  ...

>> 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.
>
>It already is, I believe.

Could you cite the relevant part of the specification?

>If the server provides charset=, it can only 
>increase the chances of this error occurring, so the server in general 
>SHOULD NOT do this.

Servers do not do this by default, it is a matter of server
configuration and thus a social problem (well, actually, this is no
"problem" at all).

Received on Wednesday, 17 September 2003 18:44:59 UTC