Re: XHTML2 MIME type

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Hello Bill,

Am Freitag, 11. April 2003 14:55 schrieb William F Hammond:
> Read RFC 2854 carefully:
> :  2. Registration of MIME media type text/html
> :  ...
> :  Published specification:
> :    The text/html media type is now defined by W3C Recommendations;
> :    the latest published version is [HTML401].  In addition, [XHTML1]
> :    defines a profile of use of XHTML which is compatible with HTML
> :    4.01 and which may also be labeled as text/html.
> :  ...
>
> It states that the definition of the type "text/html" is to be found
> in W3C recommendations.  (RFC 3236 simply registers the type
> "application/xhtml+xml".)
Thank you for pointing this out. I read this but I really missed what it means 
"...is to be found in W3C recommendations".

> Do current W3C recommendations cover the
> mime field well?
Undecided.
I think some of the WG aren't aware of the MIME problems. That's no accuse 
because they have an excuse - they have more important things todo.

> > I think it makes life a lot easier when application/xhtml+xml is
> > used, since neither updates to existing RFCs nor new RFCs would be
> > required.
>
> "application/xhtml+xml" is of limited usefulness while IE does not
> support it.  (Does IE want to think about Gecko?)  That aside, it
> could be useful in the future as the content type for XML documents
> whose root namespace is some version of html.
That's true and untrue.
You can't send XHTML using XML features as text/html to IE because it also 
doesn't support that. (No browser supports it, I think).
But application/xhtml+xml is of use when you want to use content negotiation. 
Send XHTML with MIME Type application/xhtml+xml to user agents explicitely 
accepting application/xhtml+xml such as Gecko, while others will be served 
HTML with MIME Type text/html.

> Furthermore, W3C could at some point take the position that
> "text/html" may be used for XHTML under conditions that extend the
> condition cited in RFC 2854.  For that what might make sense is XHTML
> documents residing in the root namespace of html extended by a limited
> set of common additional namespaces such as mathml, ruby, and svg.
> That is, the difference between "text/html" and
> "application/xhtml+xml" would then be that the former consists of
> documents strictly under a common list of element types for which all
> user agents have native knowledge and provide default rendering, while
> the latter require a user agent that must be able to handle "unknown"
> element types using presentation style (CSS or XSL-FO).
Well, I don't think this makes sense, because it would completely break 
compatibility.
Imagine sending XHTML 1.1 using External Parsed Entities and delivering it as 
text/html to any of the current UA's.


Bye
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Christian Wolfgang Hujer
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Received on Friday, 11 April 2003 09:12:20 UTC