Greetings,
I've been writing the registration of a new media type in the HTML WG
for XHTML using draft-murata-xml-0[78]. In doing this, I've come to the
conclusion that the draft does not provide implementors and authors
enough guarantees in order to be able to do anything more than is done
today without the "+xml" convention.
Before actually implementing the recommendations in this draft, I was
under the impression that using or seeing a media type suffixed with
"+xml" could provide me, as a user agent implementor, certain
guarantees. However, because of a lack of any MUSTs in 7.1, I am not
guaranteed that *any* of those things in 7.1 actually hold. It is quite
possible that I could receive a document described as "text/foo+xml",
yet not be able to do anything with it except fallback as text/plain.
Granted, that isn't any worse than today, but if I wanted that
behaviour, I don't need "+xml" to get it.
Therefore, I'd like to propose the following modifications for 7.1;
- first paragraph; SHOULD to MUST
- second; SHOULD to MUST
- forth; SHOULD to MUST
For the fifth paragraph I'd recommend changing the wording to reflect
that for fragment identifiers at least, registrations are free to
*extend* the syntax, but must at least support the XML syntax;
"These registrations SHOULD also make reference to RFC XXXX in
specifying magic numbers, but MUST reference it for base URIs and use of
the BOM. Fragment identifier syntax MAY be extended by the
registration, but it MUST at least reference RFC XXXX.
BTW, Appendix C references an incorrect email address for this list,
"xml-mime-types(_at_)imc(_dot_)org".
MB