Re: XHTML2 MIME type

Jim Dabell / 2003-04-08 20:29:
> 
> On Tuesday 08 Apr 2003 5:59 pm, Toby A Inkster wrote:
> 
>>Besides which, most browsers that handle application/xhtml+xml do so by
>>pushing it through a generic XML+CSS/XSLT rendering engine after
>>applying a default style, a technique that should still work with
>>XHTML2.
> 
> The technique might work, the particular implementations will not.  Even 
> when the installed user-base of XHTML2 user-agents is at 90% or so, there 
> will still be the 10% that need an older version, unless you propose 
> writing "backwards-compatible" XHTML2?

If we get XHTML2 out relatively fast I don't see any problem with using 
application/xhtml+xml for it too. Though I'd rather use text/xhtml+xml.

Rationale: only browsers that correctly send application/xhtml+xml with 
their content negotiation string are those based on gecko engine, AFAIK. 
Opera could follow soon. Any browser that doesn't even claim to support 
the type shouldn't be considered even though it really supported it. I 
believe that all gecko based browsers and Opera are going to support 
XHTML2 soon enough anyway. And it doesn't matter with older browsers 
because they don't know XHTML either.

Yes, I also feel that every different file type should have different 
MIME type but I think not everybody thinks XHTML2 should use MIME type 
like application/x-html2-2003-4+xml. The rationale for such type would 
be that because we really don't know what XHTML2 turns to be, we 
shouldn't claim that we author according to it. We can claim that we 
author to it as we know it in April of 2003.

Another way to think this: how about MIME type application/xhtml2 
(without the +xml part). This would be interpreted to contain all real 
types that are extensions of XHTML 2. Otherwise, we really should use 
MIME types like application/xhtml+mathml+svg and application/xhtml+svg+smil.

Yet another idea: is it possible to add another base type to MIME types? 
It seems that XML is getting big enough that we could really use 
something like xml/xhtml2, xml/smil, xml/svg, xml/x-my-own-format.

-- 
Mikko

Received on Wednesday, 9 April 2003 05:40:52 UTC