At 09:28 AM 4/7/99 -0700, Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:
Dispatching based on media types raises a few important issues that are
somewhat unique to XML.
While I still haven't thought all this through 100%, Paul has a good
point. There are two models we're going to see in the real world.
1. something generic gets the XML and parses it
1.a the generic something displays the XML to a human using a
stylesheet, possibly with help from other logic for embedded chunks
from different namespaces.
1.b the generic something invokes some application.
The 1.a example is of course Web browsers (although it seems there
are some nasty architectural holes in how you dispatch control for
embedded chunks of XML). I have a hard time thinking of a 1.b
example.
2. An app gets invoked to deal with a resource that happens to
be encoded in XML, and the app uses its built-in XML parser.
This case probably wants its own media type; the fact that
the encoding is XML is hardly material.
Which of these will be more common? I don't think anyone knows.
But they are both very plausible and we need to make sure there's
a good coherent story either way. -Tim