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

Thu Feb 25 00:19:09 GMT 1999

Tim Bray <tbray at textuality.com> writes:

> 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!

> >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.

You may have meant this, but it wasn't blindingly obvious to me :-), do
you mean something like:

  Content-Type: text/html; namespace-uri="http://www.w3.org/html40"
      root-type=html

  Content-Type: text/xml; public-id="[public-id]" root-type="[root-type]"

-- 
  Ken MacLeod
  ken at bitsko.slc.ut.us

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