(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
This also illustrates another characteristic of conneg -- the simple labels
that work pretty well as a dispatch mechanism in MIME are necessary but
nowhere near sufficient. In this particular case this feature tag is
becoming something that's skewed away from what the -xml suffix provides.
Ned