Interesting proposal.
But let me first introduce myself: i am a chemist involved in XML (CML to
be precise, with some SVG and MathML) and am working on a web server that
will be able to the following:
on the server side there are database with data with a limited set of
MIME types (mostly XML: CML, SVG, MathML etc). But since not all web clients
are able to work with XML, the server will convert the data into a MIME type
which the client *can* handle...
The link with XML Mime types is ofcourse that NS6 and IE5 can handle XML and
appropriate MIMEs are needed.
Oke, now my comment on the draft.
First of all, i like to say its an important draft (but you all know that).
But what i miss in the draft is mixed XML content (not referring to PCDATA),
but XML documents like this:
<xhtml:xhtml xmlns:xhtml="blabla">
... some XHTML code ...
... some article's text: ... take for example the molecular structure of
acetic acid ...
<cml:molecule xmlns:cml="http://www.xml-cml.org/";>
... 2D molecular structure ...
</cml:molecule>
... some more text: ... and if we apply the following equation to this
structure we get ...
<mathml:mrow xmlns:mathml="foofoo">
</mathml:mrow>
... and possibly more text and more foreign XML fragments ...
</xhtml:xhtml>
It is easy to give this document a text/xml MIME type, but i would say that
the mechanism which is proposed: application/mathml+xml is very interesting.
But how would that mechanism apply to the document?
application/xhtml,mathml,cml+xml
Obviously not, because you cannot register all combinations...
The reason why i think this is important is the content negotiation process,
where the client has to say something like: application/mathml+xml,
application/cml+xml etc... And in this case the client could say:
Accept: application/mathml+xml, application/cml+xml;
But this is not complete. Since namespaces are not part of XML1.0 but an
extension
text/xml does not include namespaces. So the proposal also lacks a mechanism
to say that a document uses namespaces.
These are some thoughts i had when reading draft... when considering my project
i have the two problems above:
1. there is not MIME type for XML Namespaces
2. what MIME type must the server use when sending a document like the one
above...
I hope that several can comment on this...
Egon