On May 8, 2007, at 1:25 PM, Jonas Sicking wrote:
Anne van Kesteren wrote:
* text/xsl has been added as a MIME type that causes
responseXML to return a Document object (if the resource
can indeed be parsed according to the XML specfications.)
Again, for compatibility reasons.
There is no need for the draft to encourage use of unregistered
media
types, and there is very little need for the draft to apply non-XML
treatment to media types like application/smil which are defined for
use with XML documents. I believe it is entirely sufficient and more
appropriate to state, for example, "If the internet media type in
the
Content-Type header indicates the entity body is an XML
document, ...".
Vendors have indicated they would like to have defined what that
would mean, which is what the draft now tries to say. This indeed
excludes (now obsolete?) MIME types such as application/smil but I
don't think that will cause a problem in practice. If it does, I
suppose we should get implementation feedback during CR.
I think it's inappropriate to have an absolute list like the spec
has now. Ideally I'd like to use the wording Bjoern suggested, but
if we absolutely have to list mimetypes why not do something like:
If there is no content type, or the content type is one that the UA
considers to be an XML type ... . At least the following types
SHOULD[1] be considered XML types; application/xml, text/xml, text/
xsl and any type ending in +xml.
[1] not sure if it should be a MUST or SHOULD requirement.
It should be a MUST because:
- We want test cases to cover it.
- There's no sensible reason to let a UA to not treat any of the
listed types as XML if it supports XML at all, if at least some UAs do.
I'm also not sure of the benefit of letting the UA treat arbitrary
other types as XML besides those listed. Modern XML MIME types should
all be following the +xml convention. And clearly for
interoperability we want it to be the case that the UA MUST NOT treat
text/html or text/plain or image/png as XML types. What types are
there where it would be acceptable for the UA to go either way?
Regards,
Maciej
