> I certainly agree that we should use the media type when one is provided,
> but what about something like a "file:" or "ftp:" URL, where there is no
> media type?
Some people believe that existing OSs should be revised so that they can provide
the charset parameter. Gavin Nicol said that he wrote an I-D for this purpose
long time ago. I have recently learned that an old OS from IBM does associate
every file with character encoding information.
> Here's a strawman proposal:
>
> 1. If you get the RNC as a MIME entity including information about the
> charset, then use that charset. Note that text/plain without a charset
> parameter is equivalent to "text/plain; charset=us-ascii".
I am happy with this. By the way, if we stick to the HTTP RFC, the default
is ISO-8859-1. I certainly think that this default is ridiculous.
> 2. Otherwise, the RNC is in UTF-8 or UTF-16. If it has a UTF-16 BOM, it's
> UTF-16. Otherwise it's UTF-8.
I can live with this. By the way, which UTF-8? With or without the Unicode
signature? Or, both? (Probably, both/)
> 3. A system may provide a way to allow a user to specify an alternative
> encoding for local files.
Again, I can live with this.
> 4. After converting the sequence of bytes to a sequence of characters, any
> initial BOM is discarded.
Including the Unicode signature for UTF-8? Probably, yes.
Non-ascii users will probably say that we should provide some in-band
encoding declarations. But I'm reluctant to do so.
If we need a specialized media type for our compact syntax, I think that
application/vnd.oasis-open.rng with the charset parameter is probably
acceptable.
Cheers,
Makoto
