- From: Graham Klyne <GK@ninebynine.org>
- Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2003 11:01:45 +0100
- To: Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net>, Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- Cc: www-tag@w3.org
At 00:44 18/09/03 +0200, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote: > >> 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. I think the underlying cause here is that HTTP does not, strictly, carry MIME objects, but *MIME-like* objects. This matter of charset is one of the differences between HTTP entities (term?) and pure MIME. Which rather begs the question whether it is appropriate to ask for a change to a MIME specification? HTTP and MIME do share the MIME type registry, and RFC3023 is about media types rather than MIME, so that seems OK. There is also the question: is the default charset for text/* media types part of the media type registration? For application/*, this doesn't matter so much, because the MIME specification, now HTTP IIRC, say anything about charsets for these media types. [and a different strand of this thread...] On whether text/xml is appropriate for most XML: I've often heard Ned Freed, an authority on MIME with extensive experience of its use in email, comment that he feels the choice of text/* for HTML was a mistake, because much HTML is not usefully legible to a casual user (techies need not apply for this role). The intent, as I understand it, of the top-level media type in MIME was not to split formats down by the technology they employ, but rather to distinguish by the expected primary means of presentation. It may not be so true today, but in the world targeted by MIME simple text was a common display medium, distinct from images, audio, etc. It's difficult to be dogmatic about this, but it seems to me that application/*+xml is appopriate for much XML data that doesn't clearly fall into one of the existing top-level categories. (In the same spirit, SVG's mime type is image/svg+xml, because it's clearly directed to data displayed as images.) #g ------------ Graham Klyne GK@NineByNine.org
Received on Thursday, 18 September 2003 08:06:30 UTC