MIME types vs. DOCTYPE (was RE: ANNOUNCE: New XHTML WD)

Wed Feb 24 20:09:51 GMT 1999

At 02:49 PM 2/24/99 -0500, David Megginson wrote:
>Jonathan Borden writes:
>
> > excellent. one point: there is no reason to define text/xhtml as
> > opposed to using text/xml and inserting a DOCTYPE or perhaps a
> > default xmlns definition. If a user-agent needs to know the DOCTYPE
> > ... look at it!
>
>Unfortunately, that doesn't work at all -- all DOCTYPE gives me is the
>name of the root element, optionally accompanied by an internal DTD
>subset and identifiers for an external DTD subset.

Right; as many have pointed out, in both SGML and XML the <!DOCTYPE
doesn't tell you much about the document type.

>The name of the root element is locally-scoped to the document itself,

Yes, but what if it wasn't?  It just dawned on me that if you had
*two* header parameters for text/html, one being the namespace URI of
the root, the other being its type, that would really give you a lot
of help in identifying what kind of thing this is.

E.g., if the namespace URI is http://www.w3.org/html40 (or whatever
they decide to use) and the root type is <html>, well, you know 
pretty well what you're dealing with.

 -Tim

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