Re: [apps-discuss] Last Call: <draft-ietf-appsawg-mime-default-charset-03.txt> (Update to MIME regarding Charset Parameter Handling in Textual Media Types) to Proposed Standard

[Julian Reschke <[e-mail]>]

On 2012-05-11 16:02, t.petch wrote:
> ...
> Julian
>
> Right, thanks for the reference.
> "In the general case, this is a hopeless situation. It is not entirely hopeless
> in XML, however, because XML limits the general case in two ways"
>
> But ... that is saying that XML recognises the need to be able to auto-detect
> the character encoding and is designed to do so.  This change to mime default
> charset imposes the need to auto-detect on all future text/* where the encoding
> is transported inside the payload, which the old rules did not.  Perhaps a
> corner case not worth mentioning.
> ...

a) The spec has been approved yesterday, so changing it would be tricky.

b) That being said: when a format is designed to carry the character set 
information in-line, then yes, that's should be used to detect the 
character set. If it's not possible to do so reliably, then the format 
doesn't really fall into that category, no?

Best regards, Julian