[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Why is Encoding Metadata (e.g. encoding="UTF-8) put Inside
One thing that your notes don't emphasise is that if the encoding is specified in the http headers (or similar external metadata) any encoding specified in the file must be ignored. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3023.txt There are several reasons that the charset parameter is authoritative. First, some MIME processing engines do transcoding of MIME bodies of the top-level media type "text" without reference to any of the internal content. Thus, it is possible that some agent might change text/xml; charset="iso-2022-jp" to text/xml; charset="utf-8" without modifying the encoding declaration of an XML document. Second, text/xml must be compatible with text/plain, since MIME agents that do not understand text/xml will fallback to handling it as text/plain. If the charset parameter for text/xml were not authoritative, such fallback would cause data corruption. The reasons (quoted above) for this are sound in theory but a real pain in practice where it is often easy to put the right encoding declaration in the XML file and hard to get the right encoding specified in the mime headers. David ________________________________________________________________________ The Numerical Algorithms Group Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales with company number 1249803. The registered office is: Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road, Oxford OX2 8DR, United Kingdom. This e-mail has been scanned for all viruses by Star. The service is powered by MessageLabs. ________________________________________________________________________
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