accept and accept-charset attributes

I haven't finished going through the new working draft yet, but on 
first skimming it, I had an intense negative reaction to the accept, 
accept-language,  and accept-charset attributes. This is not a formal 
comment yet, since my thoughts are still preliminary, and I may 
change my mind on further reflection.

However, I really don't see any easy way to implement this. In Java 
it would mean using sockets or java.net.HttpURLConnection or maybe 
another library like Apache's HttpClient instead of java.net.URL. 
Certainly the XML APIs like SAX and JAXP and so forth don't have any 
options to add HTTP headers. Supporting this seems like a big 
imposition that would have radical effects on how HTTP connections 
were handled for XInclude processors.

The saving grace is that this is only a should instead of a must. 
Still "should" is pretty strong in RFC 2119 terms. "may" would be 
nicer here.

This aside, I hope to have XOM updated to the new syntax within the 
next few days.
-- 

   Elliotte Rusty Harold
   elharo@metalab.unc.edu
   Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
   http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA

Received on Monday, 10 November 2003 18:12:56 UTC