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

[John R Levine <[e-mail]>]

> First, the draft registers .mjs, but the only thing it says about it is that 
> environments that use file extensions will treat .mjs to mean it is a module. 
> It has no normative text claiming that in a MIME contexts it should be used 
> as a classifier. Second, .mjs is not a carryover from 4329. It is true that 
> .js is a carryover, but the only place it appears is in the MIME registration 
> for the file extension associated with the MIME type. I don't see that as 
> problematic.

The whole distinction between a script and a module is a crock. 
Attempting to decode their strange language, it appears that a js script 
and a js module have minor syntactic differences (that's the "goal" bit) 
which presumably matter to the application consuming the text.  But that's 
no business of MIME handling.  I could have a MIME part tagged text/html 
that was in fact a Fortran program, and while it would make an application 
looking for HTML unhappy, it's a perfectly good MIME.

>> to do is to (i) allow the charset parameter but make it optional
>> and specifically provide that it is to be ignored if present ...

> I suspect there is some HTTP behavior assumption in here. But I think your 
> first sentence is correct; that should probably be labeled as "Not an i18n 
> issue, but this is Not Good ™."

I'm wondering if the BOM hack is an ancient workaround for bugs in some 
server in the 1990s that gave you UTF-16 regardless of what you asked for, 
perhaps early versions of IIS. I hope no living web server is still that 
broken.

>> What is even more troublesome is that they could rather easily
>> dig themselves out of most (sadly, not all) of this mess by, as
>> Asmus more or less put it, joining the 21st century.

Yup.

>> (ii) For Script goal sources, a charset parameter MUST be
>> specified and MUST be one of "UTF-8", "UTF-16BE", or "UTF-16LE".
>> If it is omitted, the receiving system MAY dig itself into as
>> deep a whole as it prefers, possibly using BOM heuristics if
>> there is an explicit "MUST use Unicode" requirements for Script
>> goals.

Once again, I think that importing the semantic difference between js 
modules and scripts into MIME is a mistake.  It's OK to have .mjs as a 
hint about what it's intended to be, but not to make that affect the MIME 
processing.

Regards,
John Levine, [e-mail], Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly