Re: [I18ndir] Review volunteer needed (Fwd: [dispatch] WGLC of draft-ietf-dispatch-javascript-mjs-07)

[John Levine <[e-mail]>]

I looked at it and have different concerns.

A chunk of Ecmascript can either be a script or a module, which differ
syntactically, but that you can't tell apart by looking at them, so
you need external hints.  Sec 3 says that if the file extension is
.mjs, that is the hint that it is a module.  Sec 4.1 says that modules
are always in UTF-8.

Sec 4.2 has three steps which I believe are supposed to be done in order.

Step 1 says that if you know it's a module you know it's UTF-8, so stop.

Otherwise you sniff the data to see if it starts with a BOM, and if
so, that tells you the encoding and you otherwise ignore the BOM.

Step 2 says look at the charset, and believe if if you understand it.

Step 3 says if all else fails, assume it's UTF-8.

It looks like step 1 is saying that if the text starts with a BOM, you
ignore the declared charset and sniff the BOM instead, which sounds to
me like an ancient workaround that is perhaps no longer needed.

Given that they are deprecating all of the existing javascript media
types and reviving text/javascript which 4329 declared obsolete, this
might be a good time to say if you're going to use our lovely new
(old) media type, declare the correct character set so consumers can
believe it and stop doing byte sniffing kludges.

R's,
John