- From: Jamie Lokier <jamie@shareable.org>
- Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2004 02:02:54 +0100
- To: Dare Obasanjo <dareo@microsoft.com>
- Cc: Alex Rousskov <rousskov@measurement-factory.com>, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net>, ietf-http-wg@w3.org, Atom Syntax <atom-syntax@imc.org>
Dare Obasanjo wrote: > > Atom WG cannot solve the problem in the middle of the above > > chain. You can recommend that atom+xml resources do not use > > .xml extension if possible; you may recommend .atom extension > > where applicable. > > How does recommending a file extension actually solve the problem? > Specifically how does it solve the problem any better than just > recommending a MIME type? They're expecting these files to be served on mis-configured servers (like apparently a lot of similar files are now). A mis-configured server which sees .xml will, apparently, tend to call it text/xml. (That's silly as application/xml is the only thing that makes sense as a HTTP server default for .xml files). (Though, frankly, text/xml with no charset modifier should never have meant "us-ascii" overriding the <?xml..?> declaration -- that's just silly. text/html doesn't force us-ascii interpretation, so the text/xml meaning isn't even consistent with other text/* types). A mis-configured server serving .atom will, presumably, either omit the content-type altogether or pick a useless default like application/octet-stream. Clients, as we know (ahem, Microsoft), ignore application/octet-stream and look at the URL extension in that case. So they'll interpret the .atom file correctly. :) That's much better than clients looking in the <?xml..?> declaration for the character encoding, when they've been told it's text/xml, isn't it? :) :) To be fair, a lot of web servers provide no practical way, or no easy way, to get the content-type set for .xml files to one thing for some kinds of XML and another thing for other kinds of XML. Nonethless, I suspect the correct fix in _this_ case is to change the standards to admit that text/xml (with no charset) doesn't force a us-ascii charset, because that's silly, and if an XML file starts with an <?xml..?> declaration which specifies the encoding, _that's_ the encoding of the file. Just like text/html. -- Jamie
Received on Thursday, 24 June 2004 21:03:09 UTC