It's not clear that specialized media types solve any problem at all,
in the case of XML that already contains a document declaration.
On the contrary, it is very clear that they do solve at least some set of
problems. There is no explanation for the large numbers of people happily
registering these things otherwise. We have ample experience to tell us that
people won't bother with this sort of administration unless they see some
possible advantage to doing it, and won't continue to do it unless those
advantages turn out to be real.
On the contrary, there may be a very plausible reason why 'large numbers of
people' are registering specialized media types: there is no suitable
alternative that is supported by the browser vendors at large. There may
be very real advantages in an organized content negotiation scheme, but
they can't be realized if there is no vendor support. I don't believe that
resorting to file extensions can possibly be the way of the future. We
all need a better alternative.
Murray, it sounds to me like you are agreeing with me, not disagreeing. All I
ever claimed was that contrary to Larry's assertion, it is clear that a real
problem is being solved by registering various XML-derived types. I never
claimed that this is the correct solution to the problem, or that this is the
only problem around that needs a solution, or that this wasn't a solution
forced by the current characteristics of browsers.
And nowhere did I say that file extensions are being used. These
are MIME types, not file extensions.
Ned