On 17 Jan 2002, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
Sorry to come to this discussion late. (Those reading this on
ietf-xml-mime may want to visit
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2002Jan/index.html and read
the Media Types thread.)
On Thu, 2002-01-17 at 13:41, Mark Baker wrote:
[Tim Bray]
Hm... you're creeping in the direction of deprecating media type
MIME headers in the case where the resource body is XML.
Not deprecating, just creating a parallel alternative. But if it's
done well, it could become a 90+% solution.
To start
with, should such a discussion happen at least partly over in the
IETF?
For sure. This won't happen without the IETF.
For me, the main points (which simon has nicely captured) for XML and
MIME are::
* using URIs to reference vocabulary definitions
* XML documents can reference multiple vocabulary definition
* The mime mechanism can capture only one of these vocabularies
(note how this dances carefully away from the word 'type' ;-) )
MIME really doesn't give you a nice way of defining multipe properties for
a single resource, other than the media features extension described
in RFC 2912. Using this extension (Designed for a different purpose, BTW)
you could write something like:
Content-Type: text/xml;
Content-features:
(& (primary-namespace="uri1")
(secondary-namespace="uri2")
...
)
The question then is -- does that really give you anything particularly
useful over text/xml+whatever? Once I started to think through some
uses, I honestly couldn't think of a compelling advantage ...
Ian