Re: XHTML2 MIME type

Ian Hickson / 2003-04-11 19:02:

> On Tue, 8 Apr 2003, Jim Dabell wrote:
> 
>>Will there be a new MIME type for XHTML2, or are people expecting to use
>>application/xhtml+xml?  If there is not going to be an XHTML2-specific MIME
>>type, how are servers supposed to distinguish between user-agents that can
>>handle XHTML2 and those that cannot (for the purpose of content negotiation
>>in particular)?
> 
> The same way that they distinguish UAs that can support XHTML that
> contains MathML, XHTML that contains SVG, XHTML that contains MathML, SVG
> and ChemML, XHTML that only contains ChemML...
> 
> There is a rather dire need for a *simple* extension to the HTTP content
> negotiation protocol that covers namespace support.
> 
> See also: http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1036767231&count=1

Is there a discussion about this somewhere? After reading that 
article I immediatly thought something along lines:

Accept-xmlns: http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml;q=1.0, 
http://www.w3.org/2000/svg;q=0.9, 
http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML;q=0.7

I can still vision quite long Accept-xmlns headers: perhaps some 
kind of abbreviated form should be allowed. For example:

Accept-xmlns: */xhtml;q=1.0, */svg;q=0.9, */MathML;q=0.7
or
Accept-xmlns: W3/xhtml;q=1.0, W3/svg;q=0.9, W3/MathML;q=0.7

After all, highly probably all widely used namespaces are defined by 
W3C and the rest can be referenced with full official namespace.

How the UA should express that it can render generic XML+CSS - or 
some other stylesheet language?? Yet another header?

-- 
Mikko

Received on Friday, 11 April 2003 15:04:02 UTC