ietf-xml-mime
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Re: application/xml in ietf-xml-guidelines

2002-04-17 23:45:05

At 20:37 02/04/17 -0400, Mark Baker wrote:

> > Also, I believe that "text/xml" should be explicitly not recommended,
> > due to the text/plain fallback of all text/* types.
>
> if it's just a fallback behavior, why does it matter much?

The other problem with text/xml and text/...+xml is the
charset default of US-ASCII, i.e.

Content-Type: text/xml

is exactly the same as

Content-Type: text/xml; charset=us-ascii

This doesn't work that well in many cases.

Regards,    Martin.



> actually "display as text" is probably a better fallback for XML
> than for HTML - XML generally seems to be more readable than HTML :)

When I was first introduced to this issue while writing RFC 3236, it
was made quite clear to me (on this list, I believe), that text/*
was for content that anybody could easily read.  The XML prolog would
scare off most people!  And those that make it past that would surely
be overwhelmed by xmlns declarations! 8-)

MB
--
Mark Baker, Chief Science Officer, Planetfred, Inc.
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.      mbaker(_at_)planetfred(_dot_)com
http://www.markbaker.ca   http://www.planetfred.com