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

[Simon St.Laurent]

At 06:10 PM 11/4/99 +0100, Matthew Gertner wrote:
>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.

This has been hashed out on ietf-xml-mime - see the archives at
http://www.imc.org/ietf-xml-mime/

Some key threads:
Re: Perhaps we need an XML registration tree (was Re: Parameters for
top-level XML media types?)
RE: Top-level media type xml desirable? (WAS: RE: Parameters for top-level
XML media types?)
Re: Parameters for top-level XML media types?

I took a whack at a suffix solution - see the Modest Proposal thread.

That suffix solution is in the current Internet Draft - comments are
welcome on the ietf-xml-mime list.  (The draft is at
http://www.imc.org/draft-murata-xml).

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com

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