- From: Mark Baker <distobj@acm.org>
- Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2002 12:41:59 -0500 (EST)
- To: Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM (Norman Walsh)
- Cc: steven.pemberton@cwi.nl (Steven Pemberton), www-tag@w3.org, w3c-html-wg@w3.org (HTML WG)
> Hmmm. I'm not sure if I should be embarrassed or not :-) > > I'll review Jon's original message more carefully, but "off the cuff", > I'll note that what was true "at the present stage of XML evolution" > in 1999 may no longer be true today. FWIW, I was involved in the discussions around Sun's decision on this point, and my lone contribution to RFC 3023 was intended to keep awareness of this issue alive; "An XML document labeled as text/xml or application/xml might contain namespace declarations, stylesheet-linking processing instructions (PIs), schema information, or other declarations that might be used to suggest how the document is to be processed. For example, a document might have the XHTML namespace and a reference to a CSS stylesheet. Such a document might be handled by applications that would use this information to dispatch the document for appropriate processing." The emphasis here is on *might*. application/xml and text/xml have no defined or even defacto behaviour for namespace dispatching. It would be wonderful to be able to retrofit that behaviour on top now, but that could prove problematic given that not all XML applications follow the convention that a namespace can be used to trigger a processor; the XSLT simplified form, for example. There may very well be other examples. In short, the more things change, the more they stay the same. 8-( My plan to address this is to define a new generic XML media type that can be used for content that expects this type of processing behaviour. 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, 28 January 2002 12:40:11 UTC