Re: xmlrpc and charset=utf-8

At 10:02 07/09/18, jesse_c wrote:
>
>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:

It seems to be at odd, but it's not.

>>>         http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/PER-xml-20060614/#charencoding
>>>
>>>         > In the absence of information provided by an external transport
>>> protocol

The external protocol provides a MIME type of text/xml, which as
defined defaults to US-ASCII. Therefore, there is external information.

>>>         > (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.

Yes, if they come served with a MIME type of text/xml (without charset parameter),
because that's part of the definition of text/xml. Absence of an explicit
"us-ascii" label and absence of information are not the same. That all
may sound a bit far-fetched, but that's how things are defined in the
specs, sorry.

>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. 

Adding an accessor is definitely a very good idea. Another idea is to
change the default to "application/xml". "application/xml" does NOT
imply US-ASCII, but (unless it comes with a charset parameter) means
'look at the XML document itself' (which in case of no BOM and no
encoding declaration means UTF-8).

>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
>-- 
>View this message in context: 
>http://www.nabble.com/xmlrpc-and-charset%3Dutf-8-tf1465065.html#a12748102
>Sent from the ruby-core mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Oh, great. That one is much easier to use than the 'default' one at
blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp.

By the way, there is now an official way to include pointers such as
the above into a mail header. Please see
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-duerst-archived-at-09.txt.

Regards,    Martin.


#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:[e-mail]