ietf-822
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Re: Finishing the XML-tagging discussion

2000-03-18 08:35:44
At 05:29 PM 3/17/00 -0800, Tim Bray wrote:
I repeat: whether the inventors of the media type, today, design it
for dispatch to generic XML processing machinery (and most won't) is
irrelevant to the point here.  The core notion is that the knowledge
that some media type happens to use XML syntax opens the door to 
unanticipated kinds of processing beyond those envisioned by its 
inventors, and on this basis identifying such encodings is a good
and useful thing.

Exactly.  These 'unanticipated kinds of processing' suggest that general
guidelines for how to label XML documents are a better idea than leaving it
up to groups of developers tightly focused on a particular type of
processing that only meets current needs.

Up till a year ago, I might have agreed.  As of now, there is a lot of
stuff floating around the net that claims to be XML.  For a lot of it,
I don't have the appropriate receiving software on hand; in these cases,
I've found it tremendously useful to throw it into IE5, which first of 
all, tells me quickly whether it really is XML or not, and secondly, allows
me to look at it in not-too-unreadable form.  I would *love* it if I 
could configure my user-agent to, whenever it sees a media type it
doesn't grok but happens to look like foo/bar-xml, to turn it over to the 
generic XML-capable browser.  [Or even better, based on some other mime-level
mechanism more elegant than the "-xml" suffix.]

I've been dreaming about that for a while.  Connect it to an editor, and I
know a lot of people who'd love to buy the product.  Even if I didn't have
an SVG editor handy, or some kind of generic image tool, I could tell the
browser to pass it to my preferred XML editor - Notepad, XMLSpy, XMetaL,
whatever - on grounds that the suffix suggests its possible.

I wonder what it would take to build that into Mozilla?  Hmmmm....


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