Re: [xml-dev] Text/xml with omitted charset parameter

[MURATA Makoto <EB2M-MRT@asahi-net.or.jp>]

>Perhaps worse yet, since the default for text/xml is us-ascii and not
>utf-8, this means that serving an XML document using any non-ASCII
>characters over HTTP requires the author to set the charset parameter
>of the MIME media type. This is non-trivial in most environments and
>impossible in many. According to RFC 3023, "US-ASCII was chosen, since
>it is the intersection of UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 and since it is already
>used by MIME." However, this really strikes me as insufficient
>justification given the major practical problems it presents for
>non-ASCII documents. Is there any chance of superseding this RFC with
>one that specifies UTF-8? This still isn't perfect, but it at least
>allows full use of Unicode.

No, there are absolutely no chances for such a change.  Such changes 
have been tried and failed.  MIME people will never agree to change 
the default.

So many e-mail programs use the charset parameter to display MIME entities 
labelled as text/*.  If the charset parameter is absent, such programs will 
assume that the MIME entity is us-ascii.  This change will invaliate such 
programs.

Cheers,

Makoto