RE: [office-comment] Unicode Byte Order Marks in ODF

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>]

Michael,

Thank you.  I concur with your analysis.  I had not noticed that XML 1.0
[edition 4] 4.3.3 trumps 4.3.1 (text declaration optionality) when an
encoding other than UTF-16 or UTF-8 is used, and that resolves all the cases
of concern to me except one:

I find XML 1.0 ambiguous on whether or not an XML declaration is also
required under those conditions.  The XML declaration on the XML document is
defined separately and mentioned separately (in 4.3.3) from the text
declaration on external entities (defined in 4.3.1.).  It would be
reassuring to me to have that case nailed down for the ODF applications of
XML in packages and in the standalone text/xml document form. That is, are
XML declarations required (rather than SHOULD be present) for ODF when an
encoding other than UTF-16 or UTF-8 is used.

I apologize if this case is also handled in XML 1.0.  I have not found it.

- Dennis

PS: I have another niggling, back-of-my-mind concern about MIME-type and
whether encoding information is considered an optional part of mime-type or
not.  I will do my homework on that before raising my hand (or not). 

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael.Brauer@Sun.COM [mailto:Michael.Brauer@Sun.COM] 
Sent: Friday, May 30, 2008 01:03
To: dennis.hamilton@acm.org
Cc: office-comment@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [office-comment] Unicode Byte Order Marks in ODF

Hi Dennis,

I'm of the Co-Chair of the OASIS ODF Technical Committee. Some time ago 
we received a comment from you regarding byte order marks:

http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office-comment/200510/msg00032.html

We are currently going back to the public comments we received to see 
which ones we may address in the ODF 1.2 release, which we are currently 
finishing.

As for the byte order marks, the situation is that the XML 1.0 
specification in section 4.3.3 already states that

"Entities encoded in UTF-16 MUST and entities encoded in UTF-8 MAY begin 
with the Byte Order Mark "

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#charencoding

We therefore think that it is not required to state that again in the 
ODF specification.

Best regards

Michael

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