On Tue, 1 Feb 2005 09:31:56 -0000, Phil Archer <phil.archer@icra.org> wrote: > Whilst it is easy for a professional to add a MIME type to a server, for > hobby webmasters (and, let's be honest, a lot of "professional web > designers") this is well beyond what can be expected.. Well, I do think it is important that a minimal amount of learning be suggested. Just like explaining why it is important to provide information about content in the first place, explaining how to get this right is probably a valuable investment in smarter use of the web. > So, the question is, does it make a practical difference if an RDF/XML > instance is in a file with a .xml extension and a MIME type of > application/xml, rather that nicely in a file with a .rdf extension and > a MIME type of application.rdf+xml? Well, it depends on lots of things. application/xml is just generic, almost as bad as the octet-stream that lots of servers seem to think might be useful information (it isn't. It is equivalent to saying "no idea - you figure it out"). In a case where an application has a link to a particular file (resource) and expects to process it in a certain way, so long as there is nothing saying it can't be processed like that there should be no problem. application/xml doesn't say whether something is RDF or not, but there seems no reason not to look and see if you expect that something is RDF. But I think best practice would most certainly be to configure servers properly - it really isn't very difficult if people know what to do or ask for. I hope that is helpful... cheers Chaals -- Charles McCathieNevile - Vice Presidente - Fundacion Sidar charles@sidar.org http://www.sidar.org (chaals is available for consulting at the moment)Received on Thursday, 3 February 2005 15:12:32 GMT
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