It is envisioned that HTML will use the charset parameter
to allow support for non-Latin characters such as
Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, rather than relying on
any SGML mechanism for doing so.
(referring to the MIME charset parameter) is in conflict with the
language in 2.5 that says
If the HTML specification and SGML standard conflict,
the SGML standard is definitive.
SGML has a defined method of specifying the character set encoding
of the document (the SGML declaration). HTML cannot conform to the
SGML standard, ISO 8879, if charset encodings are specified by
some other means. The solution is obviously to map from the
charset parameter to a proper SGML declaration, or to send the
SGML declaration with the document.
In any case, HTML 2.0 specifically supports ISO 8859-1 *ONLY*,
so the first-quoted section is totally otiose for HTML 2.0.
I object to adoption of this draft unless the offending language
is deleted.
Regards,
-- Terry Allen (terry@ora.com) O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. Editor, Digital Media Group 101 Morris St. Sebastopol, Calif., 95472 occasional column at: http://gnn.com/meta/imedia/webworks/allen/A Davenport Group sponsor. For information on the Davenport Group see ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/davenport/README.html or http://www.ora.com/davenport/README.html