Re: Media types

On Thursday 17 January 2002 06:18 pm, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> > the fact that XML picked a means of labelling content that is
> > incompatible with MIME's content-type is hardly MIME's fault.
>
> I think the mistake is in assigning such messages a type that
> implies it should be handled by a generic XML processor.  There is
> no such thing, even though it is possible to view all XML types via
> generic XML tools. 

A generic XML processor might imply the default for the system.... but 
I agree with the gist of this.


> A more architecturally fitting course of action
> would be to create a top-level media type of xml and then have xml/*
> subtypes, but for some reason (deployed apps, I presume) the
> top-level namespace has been frozen for ages.

I think even this is insufficient, which is what Simon is getting at. 
I might want to say that this document is *both* text/xml and xml/svg, 
for example, therby saying you can process it either way.