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

Q. What is the purpose of the namespace identifier? Is it for simple
dispatching to a 'content-type' specific handler?

Q. If the content of the message has multiple namespaces, is there always
one that is 'more equal' than the others?

Q. If there is one prefered namespace identifier, is it from the root
element (always the 'soap envelope' namespace for SOAP messages, I think),
or is it from the SOAP Body element (which might have more than one
namespace)?

Henrik wrote in
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-dist-app/2000Dec/0159.html
>
> Why not say something like
>  Content-Type: text/xml; ns="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
> where the ns parameter specifies the ns identifier of outermost element.


Q. In the case of multiple namespaces, can a space separated list of URIs be
used - for example: application/xml;ns="uri1 uri2 uri3"?

Q. If we are writing new code - both client and server - then why not use a
new header?

mmurata wrote in 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-dist-app/2000Dec/0199.html:
> A.9 How about a new Alternative-Content-Type header?
> 
>   This is better than Appendix A.8, in that no extra functionality
>   needs to be added to a MIME registry to support dispatching of
>   information other than standard content types. However, it still
>   requires both sender and receiver to be upgraded, and it will also
>   fail in many cases (e.g., web hosting to an outsourced server),
>   where the user can set MIME types (often through implicit mapping to
>   file extensions), but has no way of adding arbitrary HTTP headers.