Re: let authors choose text/html or application/xhtml+xml (detailed review of section 1. Introduction)

Sam Ruby wrote:
> 
> Dean Edridge wrote:
>>
>> As soon as the document is given the media type "text/html" it becomes 
>> a HTML document, simple as that.
> 
> Unless, of course, said document happens to contain the the following 
> bytes in the first 512 octets:
> 
>   0x3C 0x72 0x73 0x73
> 
> I continue to believe that the specification should define a canonical 
> media type of "application/html" for the SGML inspired serialization of 
> HTML5 and then proceed to define appropriate content sniffing rules for 
> "text/html".
> 
> Furthermore "application/html" should join "text/plain" and 
> "application/xhtml+xml" as content types that are *never* sniffed.

I don't understand why this is likely to work better than defining the 
content-type header to be authoritative has been in the case of text/html. In 
general, the people who would correctly make such a distinction are not the ones 
whos content relies on sniffing to work as expected. I get the feeling I may be 
missing some subtlety in your point though.

(FWIW, on the wider subject, I suscribe to the view that the spec should not 
suggest that anything sent as text/html can be considered XHTML; this is 
contrary to the way such content is processed by UAs and has no obvious benefits 
to authors yet increases the possibility of misunderstanding).

-- 
"Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?"
  -- Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead