>> 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.
That would be nice, but I don't think it's going to happen soon. The
closest thing to this is to default to using the same encoding-detection
approach as the system text editor for local files: i.e. on Windows 2000:
- if there's a UTF-8 BOM, then it's UTF-8
- if there's a UTF-16 BOM, then it's UTF-16
- otherwise, it's the platform default encoding (windows-1252 or shift-jis
or whatever)
>> 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.
Doesn't the XML media type RFC use the standard default of US-ASCII (which
I agree is ridiculous)? I guess the only advance of US-ASCII, is it makes
it a little bit easier to reliably detect a missing charset parameter: the
presence of any 8-bit byte tells you that something is wrong.
>> 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/)
With or without.
>> 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.
Including. Notepad on Windows 2000 puts a UTF-8 BOM automatically, and I
don't want that to cause an error for RNC.
> Non-ascii users will probably say that we should provide some in-band
> encoding declarations. But I'm reluctant to do so.
Me too. Imagine if every single programming language provided it's own
different in-band encoding declaration. The result would be chaotic, and
we would never see any better solution.
> 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.
Wouldn't "vnd.oasis-open.rnc" be preferable? Or maybe
"vnd.oasis-open.relax-ng.rnc" (following the OASIS organizational
structure)? It seems like there output to be a standard OASIS convention
for MIME types in the vnd.oasis-open tree. What's the procedure for
registration in the "vnd" tree?
James
