At 06:48 PM 5/6/99 -0700, Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:
There are other ways of doing this without an XML top-level type. The
process in your MUA or other viewer that dispatches a document of a
particular type/subtype pair can be told to launch an XML viewer even if
neither the type or the subtype says "xml". In the case of
"text/x-xmlnews", if you don't have an "xmlnews" viewer, you can still tell
the MIME dispatcher to dispatch "text/x-xmlnews" to the XML parser.
Are these ways as efficient? As intuitive? As generally useful across
multiple cases? I don't think so. It's extra work that accomplishes very
little. Using the xml top level type would accomplish all this and
accomodate multiple types of systems at the same time.
Having a top-level "xml" type allows you to default all subtypes for which
there is not a known specialized viewer to the generic XML viewer, just
like the top-level "text" type can default to the text viewer. It has
generally been found in the text case not to be very useful for most
unrecognized text subtypes. In order for us to want to create an "xml" main
type, we'd have to be very sure that dispatching to a generic XML viewer is
useful, and is more useful than writing the object out to disk.
I think maybe we should go back to a very simple question: what are MIME
types for?
I thought at one point that they were to describe file types. If that is
indeed the case, it might be a good idea to describe file types as
accurately and completely as possible.
I'll wait for the official response on "generic XML applications" are
useful before throwing out any more 'realistic' examples, or arguing this
particular point any further. If I'm not allowed to suggest that generic
XML applications are useful, there isn't much point to this case at all,
and we may as well stick with a broken and underutilized system.
Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer / Building XML Applications (June)
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http://www.simonstl.com