Re: let authors choose text/html or application/xhtml+xml (detailed review of section 1. Introduction)

Dean Edridge wrote:
>
> As soon as the document is given the 
> media type "text/html" it becomes a HTML document, simple as that.

Unless, of course, said document happens to contain the the following 
bytes in the first 512 octets:

   0x3C 0x72 0x73 0x73

I continue to believe that the specification should define a canonical 
media type of "application/html" for the SGML inspired serialization of 
HTML5 and then proceed to define appropriate content sniffing rules for 
"text/html".

Furthermore "application/html" should join "text/plain" and 
"application/xhtml+xml" as content types that are *never* sniffed.

Of course, browsers that don't care to maintain a distinction between 
"text/html" and "application/html" are welcome to do so -- as long as 
their support for "application/html" conforms to the html5 
specification.  Other, more conservative, browsers may chose to maintain 
dual paths for either a brief, or even extended, period of time, gated 
mainly by how close html5 as spec'ed is to html as practiced.

In order to accommodate those who are unable to configure their servers 
correctly, one of the sniffing rules for determining if a payload served 
as "text/html" is actually "application/html" should involve the <meta 
http-equiv="Content-Type"> tag.

And finally, in an attempt to reduce the chances that introducing 
another mime type is ever needed again, both "application/html" and 
"application/xhtml+xml" should have architected means of be capable of 
being extended by anybody for any purpose.

- Sam Ruby

Received on Friday, 31 August 2007 13:52:46 UTC