Re: [apps-discuss] I-D Action: draft-ietf-appsawg-xml-mediatypes-07.txt

[Tim Bray <[e-mail]>]

Disclosure: This is the first draft of xml-mediatypes I’ve read in years,
so probably is a little lacking in context.

2.2: “[UNICODE] defines three "encoding forms", which are independent of
serialization” - what does “independent of serialization” mean?  I think
the UTF-* are actually serializations of unicode codepoints.  I suppose
UTF-16 is sort-of semi-independent of serialization, but UTF-8 never is.

2nd last para of 3.1, beginning “XML MIME producers are RECOMMENDED to
provide means for XML MIME entity authors to determine what value” baffles
me.  I just read it 3 times and I don’t get it.   Could we have an example
or something?  I also think I disagree with my guess as what it’s trying to
say.  I tend to think the tools are going to do a better job of figuring
out the right charset labeling than your typical document author.

The crucial “ this specification sets the priority as follows:” indented
para in 3.2.  I think a little more is needed. The crucial corner case is
when you’ve got a MIME-header charset that is just wrong but an XML-aware
receiver can in fact sort things out based on the encoding declaration.
 What does being “authoritative” mean concretely? Is it the RFC’s
recommendation that the receiver SHOULD refuse to parse the the XML even
though it could?  If so, we should say so explicitly.

Then in the example in 9.8, draft says “all processors will treat the
enclosed entity as iso-8859-1 encoded.   That is, the "UTF-8" encoding
declaration will be ignored.”  Is this really true in practice?  I suspect
not; so perhaps you should say “all processors which conform to this
specification will”.  Hm, or perhaps the real issue is that in this case,
you can’t predict what will happen; some implementations will ignore the
MIME header, others will drop-kick the XML because of the inconsistency.

Section 3.3 typo, “thatUTF-16”, space needed, also “entitiesnot” in the
same sentence.

Also some spacing problems in the NOTE: in 8.1









On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 4:13 AM, Henry S. Thompson <[e-mail]> wrote:

> As usual, a disposition of comments against the previous draft is
> available at
>
>   http://www.w3.org/XML/2012/10/3023bis/06-comments.html
>
> and an author's diff is at
>
>
> http://www.w3.org/XML/2012/10/3023bis/draft-ietf-appsawg-xml-mediatypes-07_diff.html
>
> This draft has few changes from version 6, almost all as a result of a
> review by Larry Masinter, for which thanks.
>
> The only change even close to substantive is a summary RECOMMENDATION
> near the beginning of section 3, Encoding Considerations, which says
>
>   The use of UTF-8, without a BOM, is RECOMMENDED for all XML MIME
> entities.
>
> See the 06-comments document for a summary of the discussion about
> this.
>
> The level of comments on this draft has shifted from substantive to
> rhetorical/editorial, and I think it's now pretty much fully-baked.
> I'd very much welcome some endorsements of its readiness, so that we
> can move it up and out of here.
>
> ht
> --
>        Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
>       10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
>                 Fax: [phone], e-mail: [e-mail]
>                        URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
>  [mail from me _always_ has a .sig like this -- mail without it is forged
> spam]
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