- From: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2003 22:44:04 -0700
- To: "C. M. Sperberg-McQueen" <cmsmcq@acm.org>
- Cc: MURATA Makoto <murata@hokkaido.email.ne.jp>, ietf-xml-mime@imc.org, WWW-Tag <www-tag@w3.org>
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen wrote:
> I'm sorry to see two people whose opinions I value so highly
> agreeing with a position that so troubles me. One of the
> most important characteristics of XML, as compared with many,
> many competing formats for the storage and/or transmission of
> data is that it is textual
I agree entirely with Michael and feel that the, er, textuality of XML
is at the centre of everything. Thus, I disagree with Francois and
Makoto in their contention that XML is not usefully considered as text
for humans to look at. Having said that, I feel that the use of media
types beginning with "text/" remains inappropriate, but primarily
because of the charset defaulting baggage that comes with those five
characters. And secondarily because of the fact that the rules allow
transcoding, which is nearly certain to be wrong with XML. The second
exercises me less because I don't think it's actually happening, so the
core issue is really the charset default stuff.
--
Cheers, Tim Bray
(ongoing fragmented essay: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/)
Received on Thursday, 18 September 2003 01:45:54 UTC