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

> In this case, I don't know what it would mean to "tie" the
> Content-Type
> to a "URI" or what requirement would lead one to believe that
> XP should
> be described in a decentralized way, or in a way that the content-type
> itself were more extensible than the existing extensibility of using
> content-types (namely, that anyone who wanted to define the
> 'scrub' protocol
> could register application/scrub+xml and use it instead of
> application/soap+xml).

As you know, XML namespaces use URIs as identifiers and as an example, RDF
uses "http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#". This means that parts
using this XML NS identifier "http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
*is* RDF.

In order to provide a media type for RDF, one needs to tie it to
"http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" in some way as this is
how RDF is identified within XML.

While providing a media type might be useful, the proposed solution not
only forces use of a "shortname" like "rdf" which requires explicit
central registration and maintenance but it also requires a change to
existing media sub-type parsing by using the special "+" construct.

The question which I believe is still on the table is what the benefit of this
particular solution is to something like

  application/xml;ns="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"

which has been discussed/proposed on this thread and elsewhere [1][2]
and which

  a) doesn't require central registration of any short name
  b) doesn't require special media sub-type parsing
  c) shouldn't break existing implementations as they are
     already required to support the ";" construct

I have looked through the ietf-xml-mime archives [3] but failed to find an
answer to this question which seems to be consistent with [1].

Thanks,

Henrik

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-dist-app/2000Dec/0192.html
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-dist-app/2000Dec/0159.html
[3] http://www.imc.org/ietf-xml-mime/mail-archive/

Received on Tuesday, 2 January 2001 14:41:52 UTC