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.
Flies fine for me on a regular basis. I tend to use MIME stuff on two
systems, one which supports default top-level handling and the other
does not. In the case of the latter system, scarcely a month goes by
where I don't have to go through a tedious process of adding entries. In the
case of the former, it has been literally *years* since I've touched my
MIME settings.
Ned