ietf-xml-mime
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RE: Finishing the XML-tagging discussion

2000-03-20 12:14:01
Simon St.Laurent wrote,
I've yet to hear of a meaningful 'breaking', and I'd like a
concrete example.

As far as I can tell, -xml doesn't interfere with existing
systems at all.

Depends what you mean by break, I guess. If an HTTP user agent
sends a request with Accept: application/*-xml, then as things
stand, it's as likely as not to get back a 400 Bad Request
response.

Well, that would technically be a violation of the HTTP protocol. * isn't
a tspecial, and hence is allowed in a type or subtype token.

But of course the chances of this actually working aren't good, since
the HTTP specification says that only an asterisk by itself is a wildcard.

OTOH, the use of parameter matching, while defined, is called "rare"
in the specification and AFAIK is never used in practice (the one
parameter where it is obviously useful is charset, but that parameter
has a separate accept- field of its own). So I wonder how well trying to
match a parameter would work in practice.

                                Ned