Re: XHTML2 MIME type

* Masayasu Ishikawa wrote:
>As I noted in earlier message, neither new media type nor optional
>parameter can address how to deal with hybrid XML document well.

Indeed, but using the XHTML 1.0 media type for incompatible XHTML 2.0
documents could be a major hindrance to early adopters of XHTML 2.0,
since it would be rather hard if not impossible to determine whether
the user agent supports XHTML 2.0 on the server side. Even if there
were a profile parameter for XHTML 2.0, it's IMO unlikely that user
agents will pass that to the server and parameters typically don't fit
well into existing means for server configuration and content
negotiation. Enthusiasts would either need to determine XHTML support
based on the nowadays often suppressed user agent HTTP header or find
equally bad workarounds or stick to XHTML 1.x. Without authors using
XHTML 2.0, browser developers will probably consider XHTML 2.0 support
less important, it'd take more time to find bugs in the implementation,
etc. Hence I think there should be a MIME type designating XHTML 2.0
Family document types. application/xhtml+xml might also be used for
XHTML 2.0 documents, but there should be a seperate one and conforming
user agents should be required to support both. This wouldn't do any
harm and give a lot of benefit to XHTML 2.0 authors.

Received on Friday, 11 April 2003 10:02:12 UTC