In message "Re: Some text that may be useful for the update of RFC 2376",
Chris Lilley wrote...
MURATA Makoto wrote:
We are all aware of this problem. We are also aware of transcoders
which changes the charset parameter but does not rerwrite encoding
declarations.
Yes - such behaviour is clearly broken. Since a transcoder is changing many
or all the other bytes in the file, expecting it to also correctly update
the encoding declaration rather than leaving it broken is not asking too
much.
I think that such a transcoder is very helpful because it works for
all textual formats and also because it is very efficient.
The charset parameter is such a solution.
It is one such solution. There are better ones, and indeed a much better
one in the XML specification.
It works only for XML. It is not bad, when the MIME header is not available.
But when it is available, we must rely on the charset parameter.
We should not try to bend
specifications only to invent an ad-hoc solution for a particular format.
I can only agree with that sentence by replacing "format" with "protocol".
You are advocating different in-band encoding signatures for different
formats. I think that this is a significant burden to users and speficiation
developers.
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MURATA Makoto muraw3c(_at_)attglobal(_dot_)net