Objections to draft-ietf-html-spec-01.txt

[Terry Allen <[e-mail]>]

Re the Last Call, I objected (to the html-wg mailing list), as soon
as this draft was published, that the section in 2.4 reading

         It is envisioned that HTML will use the charset parameter
         to allow support for non-Latin characters such as
         Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, rather than relying on
         any SGML mechanism for doing so.

(referring to the MIME charset parameter) is in conflict with the 
language in 2.5 that says

      If the HTML specification and SGML standard conflict,
      the SGML standard is definitive.

SGML has a defined method of specifying the character set encoding
of the document (the SGML declaration).  HTML cannot conform to the
SGML standard, ISO 8879, if charset encodings are specified by
some other means.  The solution is obviously to map from the
charset parameter to a proper SGML declaration, or to send the
SGML declaration with the document.

In any case, HTML 2.0 specifically supports ISO 8859-1 *ONLY*,
so the first-quoted section is totally otiose for HTML 2.0.

I object to adoption of this draft unless the offending language
is deleted.

Regards,

-- 
Terry Allen  ([e-mail])   O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
Editor, Digital Media Group    101 Morris St.
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