- From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 16:14:46 -0500
- To: www-xml-xinclude-comments@w3.org
I no longer think the three accept attributes are particularly difficult to implement, at least in Java. Once I sat down and implemented them, they were quite straight-forward, and required only minor, non-public changes to my code. I do, however, wonder about the choice of the specific three attributes we've been given. accept-language is a clear winner. You might well want to choose the French or English or Chinese version of a resource. This one makes sense. The use case is obvious and compelling. accept is more questionable. Still, especially when parse="text", I can see asking for the xml or html version of a resource as appropriate if I were trying to write a tutorial about one language or the other. It's a bit of a stretch but the use-case is there. accept-charset makes no sense to me whatsoever. Almost always the document returned by a server in the requested charset will be a straight transcoding of the same document in a different charset. It seems very unlikely (and probably a bug) if the document content differs from one charset to the next. Furthermore, whatever charset the resource is served in, the XML parser will simply transcode into its native format. No artifact of the charset should be left after resolution. Perhaps the client wishes to ask for only those charsets it knows how to process? Perhaps, but this decision is much beter made by the client software than the document. For instance, I might wish to code my implementation such that it can accept all charsets Java understands. Daniel Veillard might wish to code his implementation so that it accepts only those charsets libxml understands. I don't see why either of our implementations should be controlled by what's in the document. The document does not know whether it will be processed by libxml, XOM, XInclude.NET, something else, or all of the above. The decision about which charsets to accept should be left to the processor, not embedded in the document. Therefore I am making a formal comment requesting that the accept-charset attribute be eliminated from XInclude, and that processors be allowed to make their own choice of charsets to be negotiated with the server. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold
Received on Thursday, 29 January 2004 16:15:35 UTC