Christopher> Why not use text/x-xml-rpc? XML has a billion uses, that Christopher> honestly, it will eventually end up as: xml/rpc instead, Christopher> most likely :-) Christopher> What's the status of text/xml as a standard MIME type? In reverse order: I suppose text/xml is either already approved or well on its way to approval. It's too hot for the approval folks to ignore. All text/xml says is that XML is the "syntax" of the message. Interpreting the semantics of the message is up to the receiver. Everybody who thinks it's okay to start annotating the media type with semantic information should take a quick look at their local mime.types file. Note that the types there don't say anything about how to interpret the contents, just what the format of the contents are. There is an image/gif type which we are all familiar with. There are not image/gif-car, image/gif-naked-bodies and image/gif-xy-plot types. The media type of a request or a response is just that, nothing more. Skip Montanaro | Mojam: "Uniting the World of Music" http://www.mojam.com/ skip@calendar.com | Musi-Cal: http://concerts.calendar.com/ 518-372-5583
On Sat, Jan 23, 1999 at 01:25:07PM -0500, skip@calendar.com wrote:
[ I point out the difficulty in negotiationg text/xml with applications ] In reverse order:
I suppose text/xml is either already approved or well on its way to approval. It's too hot for the approval folks to ignore.
Alas, yes you are right, bu then IETF has been more driven by the suits than engineering since IPv6 started... What won won because (in my opinion as one of the authors of a competing solution) cisco/etal didn't want anything that might require HUGE rewrites... even though it would scale much further, longer, and allow for much faster routing...
[ Skip compares text/xml to image/gif, and notes no application layer symantics are present ].
This is a bit of a red-herring... there is a substantial difference that comes from the following: XML really requires (at least SGML) a DTD to form it, and this is carried in the body, but in many things (according to my friends at Interleaf) it's implicit and the DTDs will go away over time... Now, how am I to do negotiation then to say that I accept XML for a specific purpose? Perhaps I accept an XML doodad for purpose A, but not purpose B, but if I say I accept MIME type 'text/xml' then I can't differntiate between these. Your comparison to GIFs isn't material, as it's content, not format driven. There are different MIME types for Real Audio v. QuickTime, even though you could describe both as a single type of octet-stream, no? XML can vary all over the place, and XML-RPC has a specific specification, therefore, it should have it's own bit attached. text/blah to ME is reserved for that information destined to be human readable, which most certainly XML is not. Therefore, the comment about xml/foo, not text/xml. But that's just me, I have no participation in IETF any more. Chris -- | Christopher Petrilli | petrilli@amber.org
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