RE: text/xml for SOAP (and XP) considered harmful

Dennis Keeling and others have publicly given demonstrations in which XML
messages (SOAP messages, in fact) were processable by some agents as data
and yet were, without modification, also viewable by causal users of
browsers.  In his case, a purchase order could be entered into an accounting
system and/or rendered on a browser screen.

In fact, this is typical of much data expressed in XML, and is part of the
intention of the semantic web, namely that the same information is viewable
by casual users (via a style sheet) and processable by an application
looking for semantically-bound elements.

-----Original Message-----
From: mmurata@trl.ibm.co.jp [mailto:mmurata@trl.ibm.co.jp]
Sent: Monday, December 11, 2000 6:39 PM
To: xml-dist-app@w3.org
Cc: mmurata@trl.ibm.co.jp
Subject: text/xml for SOAP (and XP) considered harmful


Folks,

I am writing as a co-author of an upcoming Proposed Standard 
RFC for XML media types.  It is in the RFC editor's queue.

http://www.rfc-editor.org/queue.html

SOAP uses "text/xml".  But it should use "application/xml".  
"text/xml" is appropriate only when the XML document is 
readable by casual users (not programmers).    More about 
this issue, see the latest I-D as below:

http://search.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-murata-xml-09.txt

Best,

IBM Tokyo Research Lab / International University of Japan, Research
Institute
MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given)

Received on Tuesday, 12 December 2000 15:04:01 UTC