- From: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2003 17:16:16 -0700
- To: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>, dan@dankohn.com, murata@hokkaido.email.ne.jp, WWW-Tag <www-tag@w3.org>
On the TAG telecon today, we were discussing our draft finding "Client
Handling of MIME Headers"
(http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/mime-respect.html), which grumbles about
the contents of RFC3023 with respect to charset handling.
I took an action item to ask 3023's authors if there was any chance to
revise what it says about the charset parameter; I think we have fairly
widespread agreement as to what needs to be done:
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, which has a very high probability of being wrong, which is
irritating because if there were no charset header the client would have
an excellent chance of getting it right. And forcing the server to
provide a charset= is wrong; see the next point.,
2. Deprecate the charset parameter for application/xml and
application/*+xml. I think that Roy would like to go far as to simply
outlaw it; I'd be fine with that too. The reason is that the client is
almost certain to get it right, and will fail deterministically if it
doesn't. For the server, on the other hand, this is really hard to get
right, particularly with the introduction of various kinds of filters in
modern web servers. And since the Web architecture and the XML spec
says that the server's claim has to be taken as authoritative, this is
really highly dysfunctional. At the very least, it should be made clear
that nobody sending a media-type should send a charset for an XML
media-type unless it REALLY REALLY KNOWS what it's sending, and in that
case should consider not sending it anyhow.
Makoto, Simon, Dan, any chance? It's going to be kind of embarrassing
for TAG findings and the Webarch doc to be saying "don't do what this
RFC says".
--
Cheers, Tim Bray
(ongoing fragmented essay: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/)
Received on Monday, 15 September 2003 20:16:12 UTC