ietf-xml-mime
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: Using CONNEG instead of MIME types for compound types & references

1999-05-11 05:34:33
At 10:38 AM 5/10/99 -0700, 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.

So long as I can gather from the MIME type that the content I'm getting or
about to get is XML, that's a big step forward.  Multi-part XML doesn't
frighten me, and in hard cases where content negotiation is genuinely
needed, it'll be worth the effort of the many proposals you've noted.

I do not, on the other hand, want to be forced to go through content
negotiation protocols just to find out that a document uses XML syntax.
For short documents, that could be almost as bad as downloading the
document in its entirety.

The beauty of MIME types is that they present a lot of useful information
in a very tiny capsule that's easy to work with. I'd like to make sure they
contain as much useful information as possible without making that capsule
any larger.

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer / Building XML Applications (June)
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com