Last call comment: Why?

I am confused as to why the mime:contentType attribute is required.

It would seem that applications that expect binary content will have to be 
hardcoded to support the elements in which that content appears anyway, so 
supporting an attribute on those elements as well seems like it wouldn't 
require the use of namespaces.

As a data point: XLink is used in SVG on elements that refer to external 
resources, as in <style xlink:href="">. The theory is that by reusing the 
same attribute for all links, the implementation is somehow able to reuse 
code. However, in practice, the UAs have to have code for each embedding 
mechanism, and the attribute doesn't help at all by being in the XLink 
namespace.

So while I can understand that XML Schema may need to be extended to 
support MIME types as a first-class data type, it would seem that the 
actual mime:contentType attribute is superfluous.

Cheers,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Thursday, 18 November 2004 15:49:18 UTC