XML as a top-level media type (was Re: Fw: XHTML 1.0 returned to HTML WG)

[Matthew Gertner]

Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
> >A few respondents were also concerned about the use of the text/xml
> >media type for delivering xHTML, considering this to be "premature".
> >If a document conforming to XML 1.0 and XML Namespaces is not to be
> >considered "text/xml", this raises an important issue as to what is.

I am curious to know whether the idea of using "xml" as the top-level
media type, rather than the subtype, has occurred to anyone. This seems
apt to me because XML applications are going to need both the
information that a given media type is XML and information about the
precise schema that the media type conforms to. This is, I suspect, why
neither the "text/xml" or "text/xhtml" variants seem entirely
satisfactory. In my opinion "xml/xhtml" (and the precedent thus set)
would solve all these problems and enable applications to work with XML
documents both generically and in a way specific to a given schema. On
the other hand, I have no idea what the implications of creating an
entirely new top-level media type are.

Matthew

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