ietf-xml-mime
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RE: Some text that may be useful for the update of RFC 2376

2000-03-14 07:20:21
At Monday, March 13, 2000 9:19 PM, Chris Lilley wrote:

[snip]
Charset parameter is required if the charset is not UTF-8 or UTF-16
[snip]
The charset (not default, but THE charset) is UTF-16 (if BOM) or
UTF-8 (if no BOM) and the "default" of iso-8859-1 in HTTP and
US-ASCII in mail is explicitly overridden ...

I think this proposed change of the definition of media type
"text/xml" is a good idea, because it reflects the expectations of
users (at least the users I know).

We are developing an XML-database that gets input via HTTP.
In a previous release we implemented RFC 2376 correctly (for
media type text/xml we used the value of the charset parameter to
determine the encoding of input documents; if this parameter was
omitted we used the default "us-ascii").
It was not possible to "sell" this behavior to users. They
insisted that it is wrong to use "us-ascii", if the charset parameter
is omitted and the encoding declaration in the XML declaration 
specifies the correct encoding.
Unfortunately both Microsoft IE5 and Netscape Navigator do not 
send charset parameters at all when data is uploaded from HTML
forms. 

All the best,
Paul


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Paul Langer               e-mail   Paul(_dot_)Langer(_at_)softwareag(_dot_)com
Software AG               Tel.     +49-6151-92-1912
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