- From: Martin Duerst <duerst@w3.org>
- Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2003 13:53:08 -0400
- To: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>, Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net>
- Cc: ietf-xml-mime@imc.org, WWW-Tag <www-tag@w3.org>
At 09:37 03/09/18 -0700, Tim Bray wrote: >The argument is precisely is that it is not in the slightest useful. >Please read appendix F to the XML specification. Then please suggest a >plausible scenario in which an XML instance unaccompanied by a charset >parameter can cause breakage. You'll have to work hard. No, I think it's quite easy. User buys an English XML book. XML book has examples with and without XML declarations (and those examples with an encoding parameter will use any of 'US-ASCII', 'iso-8859-1', and 'UTF-8'). The book probably somewhere has a note somewhere explaining what the encoding parameter means,..., but that might not be featured prominently, because it's not usually that important for English. User copies/adapts examples. Uses a text editor, adds text (e.g. Polish, or Chinese, or whatever). The XML file is broken. >To put it another way, quoting Larry Wall: "An XML document knows what >encoding it's in." In the above example, it pretends to know, but it is wrong. Regards, Martin.
Received on Friday, 19 September 2003 14:05:19 UTC