From: jesse_c <jesse@...>
Date: 2007-09-18T10:02:47+09:00
Subject: Re: xmlrpc and charset=utf-8




Dominique Brezinski wrote:
> 
>> On Monday 19 June 2006 13:35, Kazuhiro NISHIYAMA wrote:
>> > > Was this ever addressed?  I vote for both a default of
>> > > utf8 and an accessor method.
>> >
>> > http://www.zvon.org/tmRFC/RFC3023/Output/chapter8.html#sub5
>> >
>> > | This example shows text/xml with the charset parameter omitted.
>> > | In this case, MIME and XML processors MUST assume the charset is
>> > | "us-ascii"
>>
>> This is interesting.  It seems to be at odds with the XML specification,
>> which
>> says:
>>
>>         http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/PER-xml-20060614/#charencoding
>>
>>         > In the absence of information provided by an external transport
>> protocol
>>         > (e.g. HTTP or MIME), it is a fatal error for an entity
>> including an
>>         > encoding declaration to be presented to the XML processor in an
>> encoding
>>         > other than that named in the declaration, or for an entity
>> which begins
>>         > with neither a Byte Order Mark nor an encoding declaration to
>> use an
>>         > encoding other than UTF-8. Note that since ASCII is a subset of
>> UTF-8,
>>         > ordinary ASCII entities do not strictly need an encoding
>> declaration.
>>
>> I read this to say that XML documents, in the absence of both external
>> encoding information or an XML declaration, must be assumed to be UTF-8.
>> RFC3023 appears to be saying that XML documents default to US-ASCII.
> 
> You are correct in your interpretation of the XML spec, and I agree
> that mentioned XMLRPC C library appears to be the flawed
> implementation. The XML spec reads:
> 
> Although an XML processor is required to read only entities in the
> UTF-8 and UTF-16 encodings, it is recognized that other encodings are
> used around the world, and it may be desired for XML processors to
> read entities that use them. In the absence of external character
> encoding information (such as MIME headers), parsed entities which are
> stored in an encoding other than UTF-8 or UTF-16 MUST begin with a
> text declaration (see 4.3.1 The Text Declaration) containing an
> encoding declaration....
> 
> And RFC 3023 states that charset parameter of the text/xml
> registration is strongly recommended. The following description of the
> charset parameter is straight from RFC 3023:
> 
> Although listed as an optional parameter, the use of the charset
> parameter is STRONGLY RECOMMENDED, since this information can be
> used by XML processors to determine authoritatively the character
> encoding of the XML MIME entity.  The charset parameter can also
> be used to provide protocol-specific operations, such as charset-
> based content negotiation in HTTP.  "utf-8" [RFC2279] is the
> recommended value, representing the UTF-8 charset.  UTF-8 is
>  supported by all conforming processors of [XML].
> 
> Cheers,
> Dom
> 
> 
> 

It doesn't seem that anything ever became of this. I would like to re-open
the topic for discussion with another vote for defaulting the Content-Type
header to "text/xml; charset=utf-8" but adding an accessor so this value can
be overridden. 

My specific need comes from trying to interface with weblog software via the
MetaWeblog API. Some blog packages incorrectly throw invalid content-type
faults because they don't recognize the charset parameter.

Currently I have overridden do_rpc to set "Content-Type"   => "text/xml" but
this seems less than ideal.

-Jesse
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