Re: [xml-dev] xml over http - RFC 3023

[David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>]

>  It's generally just much easier for people to put the encoding
> directly in the   document (or entity), in which case any external
> content-type can and should be ignored.

No. The XML REC is very explicit that if the encoding is specified in
both places the external specification should be used and the encoding
declaration ignored. 

The thinking is/was that this allows proxies and mail gateways and
things to reencode documents witout having to go in and edit the
document, however it's a real pain because in many scenarios it is so
much easier to get the ecoding right in the file, than it is to get it
right on the server.


xml 1.0 5th edn, ehich has just come out has made many incompatible
changes, but it hasn't changed this, it still defers the question of
whether external or internal encoding is authorative to the respective
mime type registration, which is (now) 3023 which says

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3023.txt

  There are several reasons that the charset parameter is
      authoritative.  First, some MIME processing engines do transcoding
      of MIME bodies of the top-level media type "text" without
      reference to any of the internal content.  Thus, it is possible
      that some agent might change text/xml; charset="iso-2022-jp" to
      text/xml; charset="utf-8" without modifying the encoding
      declaration of an XML document. 


David

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