RE: Comments on draft-yergeau-rfc2279bis-00.txt

[Francois Yergeau <FYergeau@alis.com>]

Martin Duerst wrote:
> At 15:35 02/10/03 +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> >   Receivers MAY recognize and remove the BOM in larger, usually
> >   labeled, pieces of text (e.g. MIME entities), if it requires
> >   compability with software that generates it.  Care should be taken
> >   to not remove BOM in data that must be preserved correctly (such as
> >   digitally signed data).
> 
> I think this is fine.     Regards,   Martin.

I have three problems with the above:

1) It tells receivers what to do, whereas it should (IMHO) tell protocols
what to tell receivers to do.

2) It says 'remove the BOM' whereas 'ignore' is usually a safer course of
action.

3) It talks about 'compability with software that generates it'.  As
receivers do not generally know what software generates the stuff they get
(does your browser what editor created the page it's looking at?), this is
meaningless.  Furthermore, it seems to me that pegging behaviour on
knowledge of the identity of other software is pretty much at odds with the
idea of Internet standards: all you should need to know to interoperate is
what standard(s) that other software conforms to.


I'm OK with the last sentence, but such language is already in the draft:
"Note that such stripping might affect an external process at a different
layer (such as a digital signature or a count of the characters) that is
relying on the presence of all characters in the stream. "

-- 
François