- From: Anders Kristensen <ak@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
- Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 15:07:26 +0100
- To: www-html@w3.org
The XHTML draft invites discussion on what MIME type to use for XHTML documents, in particular how to use the generic text/xml type without loss of information. The following is some comments I sent to the authors of RFC 2376 (XML Media Types, http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2376.txt) 6 months ago. MIME and XML both define their own typing systems. In fact XML could be argued to have two: document type definitions (DTDs) and namespaces. MIME's typing system is of course the type/subtype pairs together with type-specific parameters. The idea then is to define MIME parameters for text/xml and application/xml which can be used to refer to typing info at the XML level. So this could be three optional parameters: dtd - a URL specifying a DTD fpi - a formal public identifier ns - a namespace URI I can think of the following advantages. I'm sure there are more: o It would be useful for applications which does look at the MIME content type in HTTP responses, say, but which does NOT want to parse XML content just to find out the resource's namespace or DTD. o It would allow an HTTP client to say in an Accept header the exact type of the resource it is interested in. This alleviates the need for introducing specific types for each XML encoded data type around. I'm curious about what your thoughts on this issue are. Would this make a desirable addition to the RFC? Regards, Anders -- Anders Kristensen <ak@hplb.hpl.hp.com>, http://www-uk.hpl.hp.com/people/ak/ Hewlett-Packard Labs, Bristol, UK
Received on Wednesday, 28 April 1999 10:07:31 UTC