Re: Revised Internet-Draft: Media Feature - xmlns

I like Simon's proposal [1], with one important caveat;

  It's currently difficult/impossible to do HTTP content negotiation
  on an XML-based format unless you define a media type for it.

One could arrange to do negiotiation on Content-Features, but AFAIK
this isn't defined for HTTP, and certainly not implemented.

This seems at odds with XML's easy extensibility and the lost
overhead of using XML namespaces; to do conneg on any format that I
create, I have to write an I-D, get it approved as Informational, and
then register it with IANA.

Might I suggest that any revision of RFC3023 include a new parameter
for application/xml and text/xml (say, 'rootNS') that contains the
root element's namespace URI, to allow HTTP content negotiation with
current implementations? Yes, this won't address cases where there is
a need to negotiate on more than one namespace in the document, but
it will certainly help with the simple cases, where dispatch is based
upon the root element's namespace (which seems to be the direction
things are going in).

Cheers,


[1] http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-stlaurent-feature-xmlns-01.txt


-- 
Mark Nottingham
http://www.mnot.net/

Received on Tuesday, 19 February 2002 19:20:09 UTC