- From: Mark Baker <distobj@acm.org>
- Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2002 23:00:58 -0500 (EST)
- To: tbray@textuality.com (Tim Bray)
- Cc: www-tag@w3.org
> At 01:09 PM 14/01/02 -0500, Tim Berners-Lee wrote: > I'm with TimBL down to here > > >Considering which things, I suggets that for a namespace wich will be a > >widely adopted standard and will be used as an outermost element of a > >document, it is wise but not essential to make a special MIME type. > > Agreed, but I'd go further. I'm finding it hard to imagine a situation > in which you're defining an XML language in the W3C context but don't > expect it sometimes to be served as a web resource. Given this, it seems > that the registration of a media type is awfully important. If by "served" you mean that it's a possible representation of some resource, then what about SOAP? I don't ever expect to see a SOAP envelope on a GET response. I'm not sure that's a useful criterion. > >I also think it should be emphasised that when a document is simply labelled > >as text/xml but uses, at the outermost element, a well-known standard such > >as XHTML, SVG, SMIL, etc, that any application which purports to support > >that standard hande the file appropriately, and hopefully in an identical > >way to the the way it would handle it had a more specific MIME type been > >used. > > Agreed, but there is no excuse, for example, for a server to serve SVG > under any media type other than image/svg+xml. I'm having trouble > imagining a situation in which a server knows a resource body is > XML but doesn't know anything else about it. -Tim I have no problem with people serving up SVG as application/xml. It will likely not work as well as doing it with image/svg+xml, yet, but that's the problem of the server admin. Given that application/xml + a namespace is supposed to behave identically to a specific media type (I agree with TimBL here), I don't see why we shouldn't permit server admins to exert some pressure on clients to ensure that becomes the case over time. Permitting any XML content to be delivered as application/xml (note to Norm; text/xml should die die die 8-) will do just that, I believe. A related issue is the role of the media type & namespace in content negotiation. "Accept: image/svg+xml" means something, whereas "Accept: application/xml" means much less (for now). A benefit of the "xmlns" parameter I've proposed is that it can be used for content negotiation, e.g. Accept: application/xml; xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" MB -- Mark Baker, Chief Science Officer, Planetfred, Inc. Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA. mbaker@planetfred.com http://www.markbaker.ca http://www.planetfred.com
Received on Monday, 14 January 2002 22:59:51 UTC