IE5.0 does not conform to RFC2376

[Chris Lilley]

John Cowan wrote:
> 
> Chris Lilley wrote:
> > Redundancy can be good; a
> > charset parameter and an XML encoding declaration that say the same
> > thing and work the same way, which is what I was suggesting, is good.
> 
> Yes, indeed.  Nevertheless, the charset parameter has one
> advantage over the encoding declaration: it is guaranteed by MIME
> to be in ASCII, and thus always readable. 

Okay, true

> A document with a
> Content-Type of "text/xml;charset=cp-ebcdic-us" can be affirmatively
> rejected by a client that does not understand EBCDIC, whereas a
> client which has only the encoding declaration may *suppose* that
> the document is EBCDIC, based on the Appendix F heuristics, but cannot
> *know*.

On the contrary; it can suppose that, but having made that supposition
it can check it. It can parse the document, using the cp-ebcidic-us
conversion from bytes to characters, and having done so it can look in
the XML declaration for an encoding declaration, and one of two things
happen:

1) right there, it says encoding="cp-ebcidic-us"
2) it doesn't, so it halts with a fatal error.

Please note that I am describing normative behaviour, not non-normativce
behaviour.

--
Chris



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