[I should have CCd ietf-xml-mime on the initial post, but it didn't
occur to me. Anyhow, that post can be found here;
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2002Jan/0063.html ]
Speaking for myself now,
Q. 3; What is, or what should be, the relationship between a media type
and an XML namespace?
One of the thoughts that I had quite a while ago (that I believe came
from something I saw from Dan Connolly), was of being able to migrate
from media types to namespaces by exposing the namespace through an
optional namespace parameter on a generic XML media type, for example
XHTML could be described with;
application/xml; xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml";
instead of with the custom type, application/xhtml+xml.
I raised this with the authors of RFC 3023 long ago, but they rejected
it. But I believe it remains worth considering. It seems to me to be
a nice bridge, similar to the one the XMLP WG has taken with
"relocating" SOAPAction to a parameter on the proposed SOAP media
type[1].
[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-dist-app/2002Jan/0029.html
MB
--
Mark Baker, Chief Science Officer, Planetfred, Inc.
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA. mbaker(_at_)planetfred(_dot_)com
http://www.markbaker.ca http://www.planetfred.com