[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: IE5.0 does not conform to RFC2376

• From: Chris Maden <crism@o...>
• To: xml-dev@i...
• Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 09:53:33 -0500 (EST)

> Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 09:04:54 +0100
> From: Chris Lilley <chris@w...>
> 
> The default rules if no other rule is in place for a specific Media
> type. The registration for text/xml can overridfe this behaviour if
> it wishes to.

In theory, but not in practice.  A processor that understands
text/plain but not text/xml is allowed to use the rules for text/plain
when encountering text/xml.  So although text/xml can say, "Do X," a
processor that doesn't know text/xml from text/adam may well do Y
instead.  Mandating that people who can't hear you must listen is not
particularly effective.  This is why application/xml exists: to avoid
fallback text/* rules.

> Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 09:50:19 +0100
> From: Chris Lilley <chris@w...>
> 
> So, in consequence: example file such as the Chinese XML examples at
> http://xml.ascc.net/xml/test/index.html (where each example is
> available in UTF-8, Big5 and GB2312, all correctly labelled in the
> XML encoding declaration) are now sets of invalid XML files which
> are required to produce a critical error because of the invalid byte
> sequences in what is now described as a US-ASCII file?

Describing files in encodings other than US-ASCII or ISO 8859-1 (or
maybe other ISO 8859s) as text/anything is not a very good idea.  The
rules for text/* allow many unhealthy things; 8-bit data is not even a
safe assumption, and line-end normalization can be a killer.  The
fallback rules for MIME's two-level hierarchy is only the final straw;
for non-European encodings, I would use application/xml.

-Chris
-- 
<!NOTATION SGML.Geek PUBLIC "-//Anonymous//NOTATION SGML Geek//EN">
<!ENTITY crism PUBLIC "-//O'Reilly//NONSGML Christopher R. Maden//EN"
"<URL>http://www.oreilly.com/people/staff/crism/ <TEL>+1.617.499.7487
<USMAIL>90 Sherman Street, Cambridge, MA 02140 USA" NDATA SGML.Geek>

xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i...
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)

• Follow-Ups:
  • RE: IE5.0 does not conform to RFC2376
    • From: "Gavin Thomas Nicol" <gtn@e...>

• References:
  • Re: IE5.0 does not conform to RFC2376
    • From: Chris Lilley <chris@w...>

• Prev by Date: Re: small problem
• Next by Date: re: A Line in the Declarative Syntax Sand(Was: XML complexity, namespaces (was WG))
• Previous by thread: Re: IE5.0 does not conform to RFC2376
• Next by thread: RE: IE5.0 does not conform to RFC2376
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread