ietf-xml-mime
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Re: Media typs and XPointer, XLink, XPath, and XSLT

1999-07-13 10:01:21
At 09:41 AM 7/13/99 -0700, Tim Bray wrote:
How can you possibly know, in this case, whether the resource is WF
XML?  The situation seems clear to me:  If it's application/xml
or text/xml, what comes after the # is an xpointer.  If it's
anything-else/anything-else, look in the RFC for anything-else/anything-else
to see how fragment identifiers work.  That RFC might say that the 
media type happens to be XML and it might (or might not, even if it
happens to be XML) say that fragment identifiers are xpointers.

Which is exactly why I'd like to get xml- into the MIME type identifier
instead of mucking around with RFC lookup, which doesn't work.

XPointers will work with any MIME type that requires its content to be
well-formed XML.  It seems reasonable to identify that fact in the MIME
type to avoid having to check RFCs for fragment identifier information, a
process that isn't even automatable (until we write English-language
parsers, anyway.)

As for non-XPointer fragment identifiers for MIME types based on XML
documents, I can't say I have much sympathy.  If people really want to go
that route, we're going to need something a heck of a lot more
sophisticated than the current MIME type to RFC connection, and maybe at
the point it's time to just plain start over.

Heck, we could come up with an RFC metadata spec that does provide this
information in a readily parseable and easily available format...

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer / Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
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