Re: Inconsistency between IETF and W3C: XML fragments and media types

• From: James Clark <jjc@jclark.com>
• Date: Thu, 25 Nov 1999 09:17:31 +0700
• To: MURATA Makoto <murata.makoto@fujixerox.co.jp>
• CC: timbl@w3.org, simonstl@simonstl.com, ietf-xml-mime@imc.org, Tsmith@parc.xerox.com, xsl-editors@w3.org, masinter@parc.xerox.com
• Message-ID: <383C9C3B.34DC7100@jclark.com>

MURATA Makoto wrote:
 
> 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.

I'm not convinced there is an inconsistency here.  The style element in
HTML has a required type attribute. Does that imply elements have MIME
types? I don't think so. It's just (ab)using MIME types as identifiers
for stylesheet languages.  An alternative view is that the type
pseudo-attribute on the PI is giving the MIME type of the complete
resource, as an optimization to allow the resource not to be fetched if
the MIME type cannot be handled.  On either view I don't see an
inconsistency.

James

Received on Wednesday, 24 November 1999 21:42:28 UTC