On Mon, 10 May 1999, Larry Masinter wrote:
There are a number of situations where MIME types don't solve the
problem for "content negotiation" because the XML bodies that are
transferred will be compound objects that contain multiple kinds
of markup. In such situations, having a "top level" type other
than "application/xml" doesn't do any good, since there's no useful
way to use MIME to describe the combination of elements that are
contained within.
Let us solve the simple needs of transmitting a simple document
before attempting to get multipart documents correct! Divide and
conquer.
The multipart problems (sending a document rather than an entity) are a
black hole from which we may never return.
Rick Jelliffe