Inconsistency between IETF and W3C: XML fragments and media types

We are writing this mail as co-authors of Internet Draft which is 
intended to replace RFC 2376.  One of us (Murata) is also a co-author of 
RFC 2376 (XML Media Types).  We both participate in the IETF-XML-MIME 
mailing list hosted by IMC.

There is an inconsistency between the IETF-XML-MIME ML and 
recently-published XSLT.

People at the IETF-XML-MIME ML believe that XML fragments (which 
are referenced by fragment identifiers) do not have media types.  

However, the XSLT recommendation has an example stylesheet-linking PI, 
which specifies "text/xml" for an XML fragment.  Although James Clark 
agrees that fragments do not have media types, he was not able to 
remove "text/xml" from this example, since the "type" pseduo attribute 
is required by another recommendation "Associating Style Sheets with 
XML documents".

If the XML syntax WG were active, we would ask them to publish an errata 
of the "Associating Style Sheets with XML documents" and then ask the 
XSL WG to publish an errata.  However, the XML Syntax WG does not exist 
any more and the XML Core WG is not active yet.

Since this issue is about cordination between IETF and W3C, we believe 
that we should request your attention.  We would appreciate it very much 
if you consider this issue and take some action which you think is appropriate.

Sincerely yours,


MURATA Makoto and Simon St.Laurent
Co-author of draft-murata-xml-01 
	(http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-murata-xml-01.txt)

Received on Wednesday, 24 November 1999 09:29:28 UTC