Re: [XMLHttpRequest] update from the editor

* Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>I'm also not sure of the benefit of letting the UA treat arbitrary  
>other types as XML besides those listed. Modern XML MIME types should  
>all be following the +xml convention. And clearly for  
>interoperability we want it to be the case that the UA MUST NOT treat  
>text/html or text/plain or image/png as XML types. What types are  
>there where it would be acceptable for the UA to go either way?

It is not useful to assert anyone suggests user agents treat arbitrary
types as indicating XML documents; clearly image/png does not indicate
an XML document, and even if a user agent would do that, parsing would
fail in all but the most bizarre cases, resulting in the same behavior.

It is false to assert modern XML MIME types follow the +xml convention.
The most recent type proposal, application/vnd.fcsexpress.launchfile,
does not, the reason being that the format uses XML now, but might not
do so in the future. An ISO standard case whether going either way is
sensible is application/fastinfoset, which certainly is a modern type.

If you do not support application/fastinfoset, you might well treat it
as non-XML type; you could also treat it as XML document and find you
do not support the 'finf' character encoding. Either way you get the
same behavior. Of course, if you do support it, you are not likely to
honor the proposed requirement to treat it as non-XML due to benefit/
cost considerations.
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Received on Wednesday, 9 May 2007 05:05:36 UTC