Requiring charset parameter on +xml types?

Greetings,

At the HTML WG f2f yesterday, it was proposed that we should require the
use of the charset parameter on the XHTML media type.  This came up in
the discussion over whether the media type should use application/ or
text/.

Would requiring this parameter help solve the problem of those broken
web servers that I've heard about that mislabel non-US-ASCII encoded
text/* content as US-ASCII?

Are the any other issues/pros/cons we should be aware of for requiring
this parameter?

Thanks.

BTW, for W3C members that are interested (i.e. it's not required reading
to grok this message - mustUnderstand = 0 :-), the IRC log of the
conversation is available at;

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-html-wg/2000OctDec/0104.html

MB