ietf-xml-mime
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: Finishing the XML-tagging discussion

2000-03-21 09:42:46
At 10:27 AM 3/21/00 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
Graham Klyne wrote:
(b) register a conneg feature tag to indicate XML content;  I would suggest
something along the lines of (XML-namespace="<URI>"), where <URI> is an XML
namespace identifier, as that would allow negotiation to specific XML
applications.
Which namespace?  It is already common for documents to refer to more than
one XML namespace.

Hmmm, if you believe this is a good idea, the answer is obvious: the
namespace of the root element.  The notion of content-negotiation based
on namespaces had never crossed my mind, but it has a very powerful feel
to it; surely somebody has thought of this?  Particularly in b2b-land,
where it seems inevitable that there are going to be several competing
ways to encode an invoice or a catalogue-enquiry or whatever, each ID'ed
by namespace. -Tim