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

[Francois Yergeau <FYergeau@alis.com>]

McDonald, Ira wrote:
> Please look at RFC 2640 "Internationalization of FTP" (July 1999,
> Proposed Std status currently), which says:

Funny, I just (re-)read this in its entirety today, to avoid covering myself
with ridicule.

It turns out that RFC 2640 mandates UTF-8 for *pathnames* (which is great),
but does exactly nothing for labelling the charset of the payloads.

Pathnames are exactly the kind of small 'protocols elements' for which it
would make a lot of sense to ban the UTF-8 BOM.

FTP payloads are exactly the kind of 'entities' where allowing the BOM is,
IMHO, the Right Thing to do.  In any event, a ban on BOMs for payloads would
be unenforceable and, if somehow made to work, would deny service to those
who want to transfer files with BOMs (I do: when I transfer a file from work
to home or reverse, I want the BOM if any to be preserved so that the file
works the same at both ends).

Regards,

-- 
François