IE5.0 does not conform to RFC2376

[Rick Jelliffe]

From: MURATA Makoto <murata at apsdc.ksp.fujixerox.co.jp>
 >Appendix F is non-normative.  RFC2376 supercedes it, as intended by
the
>XML WG.   XML 1.0 cleary says:
>
>  "Rules for the relative priority of the internal label and the
MIME-type
>  label in an external header, for example, should be part of the RFC
document
>  defining the text/xml and application/xml MIME types.   ...  in
particular,
>  when the MIME types text/xml and application/xml are defined, the
recommendations
>  of the relevant RFC will supersede these rules."

> On  the other hand, appendix in XML 1.0 is merely informative and was
meant
>to be replaced by the XML media type RFC.

As far as making the relative priorities explicit. I hope there is no
intention to supercede the XML encoding declaration as the normative way
in which documents, not being wrapped by some higher protocol which
treats the text at some more generic level, announce their character
set.

I think the encoding declaration has been a great success: witness the
hundreds of character sets that is successfully supports. The only
problems I have heard so far are:

* some people say that UTF-7 cannot be accomodated (I have not confirmed
this is true);

* there are several 16-bit coded Unicode varieties, and so even 16-bit
Unicode will need an encoding declaration: the BOM is enough for endian
and width detection, but does not give information about whether
surrogates are used;

* the early (mandatory) normalization suggested in the W3C Character
Model draft means that it is possible that even Unicode has two flavours
(unnormalized and normalized):  the intention is that this difference in
repertoire should not be reflected in any header (everyone should just
normalize, and if you don't, things will break...hmmm)

* there is no way to support non-standard character sets (very commonly
used here in Asia) (I have a little proposal floated called "DrLove" at
http://www.ascc.net/~ricko/drlove.htm, which addresses this issue a
little bit: comments welcome on Document Resource Locations suggestion.)

Rick Jelliffe


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