I think the general consensus of the MIME community is that making HTML
a subtype of "text/" was a mistake. While it is possible to write HTML
which is readable "to some extent" as plain text, the HTML that is
generated by a typical MUA or HTML editor is so full of useless cruft
that it doesn't qualify. Perhaps a determined human being can read the
text "to some extent" but the typical human gives up.
Well, these tools would be far better off using application/html in my
mind (for many, even application/html is too kind).
So IMHO we should learn from this experience and make XHTML and other
XML-ish things subtypes of application/.
I disagree. We should have both application/ and text/ depending on
the intent. For example, I believe the following would correctly be
text/xml while and SVG image would be better application/svg+xml.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xml" href="/stylesheets/article.xsl"?>
<article>
<title>Patently Ridiculous Patents</title>
<sideline>
<img src="/images/dogbert.gif" alt="Dogbert at the patent office">
<caption>Dogbert at the patent office</caption>
</img>
</sideline>
<body>
<p>Patently Ridiculous Patents - There has been a literal explosion of
internet related patent recently. Many of these patents are trivial,
but still the cost of defineding against them will have an impact on
companies worldwide.</p>
<p>Some examples:
<ul>
<li>Information Architects now has a patent on dynamic composition for
syndication.</li>
<li>Sunil Paul got a patent (6,052,709) for email spam filtering.</li>
<li>Shmuel Shaffer, William Beyda and Paul Bonomo, received patent
6,092,114 for filtering attachments to make the easily viewable
on the target system.</li>
<li>Dan Kikinis, of Saratoga, Calif., won a patent (6,085,232) for
the DataLink Systems Corporation in San Diego for a paging
system embedded in a computer keyboard.</li>
<li>Sanjay Agraharam, Lee Begeja, Carroll Creswell, Ram Ramamurthy
and Sandeep Sibal received patent 6,085,231 for a combined voice
and e-mail system that allows subscribers to get both just by
looking in their e-mail box. The system converts voice mail into
e-mail. The system then converts the voice message into text or
a .wav file, formats either one as an e-mail and sends it to the
recipient.</li>
</ul></p>
<p>Makes one wonder where it's all going to stop...</p>
</body>
</article>