But personally the more I think about this, the less I like it, and see
so little use for media types for XML languages. Except for test files
MathML never lives on its own, it's always embedded in a larger document
type, XHTML, DocBook, TEI, whatever. Since the same document might also
have svg, you end up with application/xhtml+mathml+svg+xml and
permutations of that.
I doubt that's necessary in the general case. It is typically
sufficient that the media type is used to dispatch the processor
that recognizes the root element, permitting further internal
namespace dispatching independant of the media type. That's the
case for XHTML at least.
It seems unreasonable to expect any application to
do anything with that and in practice a more workable alternative is to
serve everything as application/xml and let the application key
individual processing requirements off the namespaces contained in the
document. (Actually my "home" isp will serve .xml files as text/xml with
no possibility of changing that, but that's a different thread)
This will happen eventually, but it can't yet be assumed that a
receiving agent will dispatch on a namespace, or have any means
of configuring namespace/processor bindings. So for the next
little while, there'll be some value in media types.
MB
--
Mark Baker, CSO, Planetfred.
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.
mbaker(_at_)planetfred(_dot_)com