RE: text/xhtml+xml vs. application/xhtml+xml

[Dan Kohn <[e-mail]>]

Gavin, I just want to point out that no one is arguing that MHTML is a bad
thing.  It's just that in retrospect, we wish application/html had been
used.  But, just because we are locked into text/html, does not mean that we
need to repeat the same mistakes for new media types.

For a description of the evolving view of where text types are (and are not)
appropriate, see Section 3.3 of RFC 2646
<http://www.normos.org/ietf/rfc/rfc2646.txt> and Section 3 of
<http://www.imc.org/draft-murata-xml>.  (For a description of when to do
+xml, see Section 7 of the latter.)

Further, it has been stated that it is better to have a single registration
rather than registering under both text and application, since if we are
having trouble evaluating the tradeoffs, it seems unlikely that most
document authors would understand the subtlety.  I subscribe to section 3.2
of RFC 1958 on Architectural Principles of the Internet, which says, "If
there are several ways of doing the same thing, choose one."

>From my understanding, everyone else on this list agrees with this
direction, and sees a certain consistency there.  Rather than doing a line
by line rebuttal of certain points, could I suggest that you state an
alternative viewpoint for future registrations (such as "always do text
unless the material is binary"), and then we can compare that viewpoint to
the ones listed above.

Otherwise, the discussion becomes needlessly abstract.

		- dan
--
Dan Kohn <mailto:[e-mail]>
<http://www.dankohn.com>  <tel:[phone]>

-----Original Message-----
From: Gavin Thomas Nicol [mailto:[e-mail]]
Sent: Wednesday, 2000-11-01 09:59
To: [e-mail]
Subject: RE: text/xhtml+xml vs. application/xhtml+xml


> This continued argument about the exact nature of past 
> mistakes is going nowhere fast, so I'm not going to
> bother to respond further to it.

Fine. One question though... 

Given

  1) choices for types
        text/xml
        application/xml
        application/foo+xml
  2) clear guidelines on their use.

do *you* have faith that developers
will do what is right?