- From: Francois Yergeau <FYergeau@alis.com>
- Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2003 10:16:48 -0400
- To: "'Tim Bray'" <tbray@textuality.com>, "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>
Tim Bray wrote: > I agree entirely with Michael and feel that the, er, > textuality of XML is at the centre of everything. I happen to agree with that. But please consider that saying 'XML is text' is not at all the same thing as saying 'XML is "text/"', as the latter is a MIME concept that carries a lot of additional (and unfortunate) baggage. > Thus, I disagree with Francois and > Makoto in their contention that XML is not usefully > considered as text for humans to look at. I'm afraid this is the case for most humans in most situations. Sure, there are people who like to view and edit XML as plain text (pleading guilty here;-), but deprecating "text/*xml" won't stop me: save to disk and fire up the editor. I don't fell I'm going to lose anything of great pragmatic value, although there is indeed a loss of conceptual value in not calling XML what it is: text. > 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. Yes. Oh, and "text/" also implies the MIME canonical form with short lines delimited by CR-LF, making UTF-16 and UTF-32 impossible, etc. Broken. To be deprecated. -- François
Received on Thursday, 18 September 2003 10:19:39 UTC