At 08:29 PM 3/16/00 -0800, Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:
Proposed solution: every time the MIME handler comes across an unknown
media type, it looks in the body part and sees if it is XML. If it is XML,
This would indeed finesse the problem. Hmm, three questions on the notion
of detecting whether content is XML:
1. is it possible in principle in the general case?
2. if not, is it possible often enough to be useful?
3. is it an appropriate kind of thing to require a general-purpose
MIME handler to do?
I'm pretty sure the answer to #1 is "no". However, my intuition is that
the answer to #2 is "yes". I don't have an opinion on #3. The code isn't
that hard to write. But should a MIME hander have to care?
I'm getting backed into a corner where, like it or not, the -xml convention
is looking substantially less bad than all the alternatives. As for
charset, if the people who are asserting that we have to support fallback to
text/plain are right, then it's gotta be compulsory. -Tim