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Re: Text/xml with omitted charset parameter

• From: Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@g...>
• To: MURATA Makoto <EB2M-MRT@a...>
• Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2001 10:14:46 +0100

* MURATA Makoto wrote:
>>Perhaps worse yet, since the default for text/xml is us-ascii and not
>>utf-8, this means that serving an XML document using any non-ASCII
>>characters over HTTP requires the author to set the charset parameter
>>of the MIME media type. This is non-trivial in most environments and
>>impossible in many. According to RFC 3023, "US-ASCII was chosen, since
>>it is the intersection of UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 and since it is already
>>used by MIME." However, this really strikes me as insufficient
>>justification given the major practical problems it presents for
>>non-ASCII documents. Is there any chance of superseding this RFC with
>>one that specifies UTF-8? This still isn't perfect, but it at least
>>allows full use of Unicode.
>
>No, there are absolutely no chances for such a change.  Such changes 
>have been tried and failed.  MIME people will never agree to change 
>the default.

  * HTML requires user agents to assume no default encoding
  * HTTP requires user agents to assume iso-8859-1
  * MIME requires user agents to assume us-ascii
  * XML requires user agents to assume us-ascii

Obviously, this is a very strict community...

XML does not need to change MIME, XML can just go and mandate UTF-8
defaulting from XML processors. Mandating UTF-8 is as inconsistent with
HTTP as is mandating us-ascii. And who cares about consistency? Look at
HTML, it forbids any defaulting behaivour, but allows user agents to use
heuristics to determine the encoding. Welcome to the wonderful world
of nonsense.

>So many e-mail programs use the charset parameter to display MIME entities 
>labelled as text/*.  If the charset parameter is absent, such programs will 
>assume that the MIME entity is us-ascii.  This change will invaliate such 
>programs.

Sorry, seems I've missed Outlook Express users complaining their XML
mails do not display properly...
-- 
Björn Höhrmann { mailto:bjoern@h... } http://www.bjoernsworld.de
am Badedeich 7 } Telefon: +49(0)4667/981028 { http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
25899 Dagebüll { PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 } http://www.learn.to/quote/

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Text/xml with omitted charset parameter
    • From: Rick Jelliffe <ricko@a...>
  • Re: Text/xml with omitted charset parameter
    • From: MURATA Makoto <EB2M-MRT@a...>

• References:
  • Re: Text/xml with omitted charset parameter
    • From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
  • Re: Text/xml with omitted charset parameter
    • From: MURATA Makoto <EB2M-MRT@a...>

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