* Yakov Shafranovich wrote: >[...] I am interested in this situation: -> Someone wants to publish database contents or schema -> Use DB-specific dumping tool to create .sql file -> Puts .sql file on web server -> Server associates .sql with proposed media type -> Someone else downloads this resource -> Checks IANA registry for the media type -> Finds proposed specification Note that there is no step "publisher of .sql file ensures that the dump tool generates US-ASCII encoded text, or otherwise makes sure the text's in a single character encoding and makes sure the web server includes the character encoding label in the `charset` header of the Content-Type header when serving the .sql file". Experience suggests that respones will include no or an incorrect label and downloaders are likely to ig- nore the charset parameter even if correctly specified. However, reading the draft the person in the sceanrio above would assume that he has got US-ASCII encoded text, even though that's fairly unlikely, especially in the future given "international text" and using UTF-8 without escapes is becoming increasingly common. Similarily, the draft would tell him to check some ISO standard for "the Structured Query Language", even though most likely he should instead identify which database software generated the file and check the manual for that software to find out about all the files. As a simple example, the dumps from <http://dumps.wikimedia.org/> read like this: -- MySQL dump 10.13 Distrib 5.1.66, for debian-linux-gnu (x86_64) -- -- Host: 10.0.6.76 Database: frrwiki -- ------------------------------------------------------ -- Server version 5.1.53-wm-log /*!40101 SET @OLD_CHARACTER_SET_CLIENT=@@CHARACTER_SET_CLIENT */; /*!40101 SET @OLD_CHARACTER_SET_RESULTS=@@CHARACTER_SET_RESULTS */; /*!40101 SET @OLD_COLLATION_CONNECTION=@@COLLATION_CONNECTION */; /*!40101 SET NAMES utf8 */; ... -- -- Table structure for table `category` -- DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `category`; /*!40101 SET @saved_cs_client = @@character_set_client */; /*!40101 SET character_set_client = utf8 */; ... They do not currently use the proposed type, but if they did, you will have to know the format of "MySQL dump" files and what the codes in the comments here mean to conclude that these are actually UTF-8 encoded files. Google will find other examples with `character_set_client` for other character encodings like "latin1". The ISO standard, as far as I am aware, will not help you there, and neither does the US-ASCII default proposed in the draft. -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@xxxxxxxxxxxx · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de 25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/