Tim Bray wrote:
I agree entirely with Michael and feel that the, er,
textuality of XML is at the centre of everything.
I happen to agree with that. But please consider that saying 'XML is text'
is not at all the same thing as saying 'XML is "text/"', as the latter is a
MIME concept that carries a lot of additional (and unfortunate) baggage.
Thus, I disagree with Francois and
Makoto in their contention that XML is not usefully
considered as text for humans to look at.
I'm afraid this is the case for most humans in most situations. Sure, there
are people who like to view and edit XML as plain text (pleading guilty
here;-), but deprecating "text/*xml" won't stop me: save to disk and fire up
the editor. I don't fell I'm going to lose anything of great pragmatic
value, although there is indeed a loss of conceptual value in not calling
XML what it is: text.
Having said that, I feel that the use of media
types beginning with "text/" remains inappropriate, but primarily
because of the charset defaulting baggage that comes with those five
characters.
Yes. Oh, and "text/" also implies the MIME canonical form with short lines
delimited by CR-LF, making UTF-16 and UTF-32 impossible, etc. Broken. To
be deprecated.
--
François