ietf-822
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RE: reason for application/iotp-xml (was RE: Registration of MIME med ia type APPLICATION/IOTP)

2000-03-12 09:25:29
why?  is there really much value in a default treatment
of text/* xml
documents as plain text?  (the default doesn't seem to
work well in
practice for text/html) or is xml really likely to be used for
image/*, audio/*, video/*, or model/* content?

I think that this actually argues in favor of 'xml/' as a top level.
It is certainly true that at least some level of processing can be
done on any XML document by generic XML processors whether or not
they understand anything at all about the rest of the type - that's
one of the primary design goals of XML.  The 'text/' top level type
is probably the _only_ other MIME type for which that is true - the
notion of something useful being possible with an arbitrary
'video/foo' type that my application doesn't understand just doesn't
fly.

I don't like the idea of the '-xml' - it introduces a new piece of
structure that we don't need.  The top level type is there for
exactly this purpose, and XML fits it better than most other top
level types.

--
Scott Lawrence      Director of R & D        <lawrence(_at_)agranat(_dot_)com>
Agranat Systems   Embedded Web Technology
http:/most/www.agranat.com/