IE5.0 does not conform to RFC2376

[Chris Maden]

> Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 09:04:54 +0100
> From: Chris Lilley <chris at w3.org>
> 
> The default rules if no other rule is in place for a specific Media
> type. The registration for text/xml can overridfe this behaviour if
> it wishes to.

In theory, but not in practice.  A processor that understands
text/plain but not text/xml is allowed to use the rules for text/plain
when encountering text/xml.  So although text/xml can say, "Do X," a
processor that doesn't know text/xml from text/adam may well do Y
instead.  Mandating that people who can't hear you must listen is not
particularly effective.  This is why application/xml exists: to avoid
fallback text/* rules.

> Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 09:50:19 +0100
> From: Chris Lilley <chris at w3.org>
> 
> So, in consequence: example file such as the Chinese XML examples at
> http://xml.ascc.net/xml/test/index.html (where each example is
> available in UTF-8, Big5 and GB2312, all correctly labelled in the
> XML encoding declaration) are now sets of invalid XML files which
> are required to produce a critical error because of the invalid byte
> sequences in what is now described as a US-ASCII file?

Describing files in encodings other than US-ASCII or ISO 8859-1 (or
maybe other ISO 8859s) as text/anything is not a very good idea.  The
rules for text/* allow many unhealthy things; 8-bit data is not even a
safe assumption, and line-end normalization can be a killer.  The
fallback rules for MIME's two-level hierarchy is only the final straw;
for non-European encodings, I would use application/xml.

-Chris
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