Different contexts - which MIME types?

Hello!

According to
http://www.w3.org/TR/xml/#sec-guessing-with-ext-info both
text/xml and application/xml can be used to send XML files.

In the case of XHTML, SVG and MathML,
application/xhtml+xml (etc.) is often recommended. This works fine if 
those files are fetched with a web browser and their contents are aimed to 
be made immediately available to the user through the user agent. But what 
if the aim of providing these files is to prompt the user with a »save as» 
dialog box? What about using MIME types such as
application/octet-stream or
application/x-download (or others)  in such cases? Or should the dialog 
box be triggered by something else than a MIME type? The information 
provided at
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3023.txt is maybe not really up-to-date and I 
consider that it doesn't answer these questions properly.

I consider that an appropriate recommendation to web authors would be 
welcome.

Regards!

Saašha,

Received on Tuesday, 20 December 2011 01:49:53 UTC