Re: Agenda for XML Core WG telcon of 2004 November 24

I won't be able to make the telcon, so here are my thoughts on the
XForms stylesheet issue.

It seems to break down into a couple of questions:

 - Should they use the xml-stylesheet pi?

   - The pi is not intended to be only for XSLT, so it seems
     reasonable to use it *if* this use of XForms can be considered to
     be application of a stylesheet.  Can it?  I don't know enough
     about XForms to be sure.  The Note talks about "editor" documents
     - are these in effect stylesheets that display an XHTML document
     in such a way that it can be edited?

 - If they should use the pi, what mime type should they use?

   - Is the mime type intended to determine the kind of stylesheet?
     The original example was text/css, which seems clear enough.  But
     XSLT uses text/xml and application/xml (at least, those are the
     types the XSLT spec says XSLT stylesheets should have until an
     XSLT-specific one is defined; the xml-stylesheet example in the
     XSLT spec uses text/xml).

     If it is intended to determine the kind of stylesheet, using
     application/xml clearly doesn't make sense.  But it seems that in
     practice mime types are not adequate for this.  New types are not
     created whenever a new XML application is invented.  There is a
     theory that the mime type should be enough to let you parse the
     document, and then you can determine what to do with it.  In that
     case, application/xml would fit.  Is this theory blessed by the
     TAG?  Does it correspond to what real browsers and other
     stylesheet-applying applications do?  It has the disadvantage
     that you have to fetch the stylesheet before you can determine
     whether it's any use to you.

-- Richard

Received on Tuesday, 23 November 2004 18:22:59 UTC