Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
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?
Currently mozilla treat 'text/rdf' as XML in addition to that list,
though I don't feel strongly about including that. Don't know how much
stuff out there with that mimetype. I'll check with rdf people.
If we are making the list absolute, I feel weird about including things
like 'text/xsl' and 'text/rdf' as neither of them are real mimetypes. Is
there really a lot that would break if 'text/xsl' was not included?
/ Jonas
