On Tue, Jan 25, 2005 at 02:39:17AM +0100, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
* Martin Duerst wrote:
At 04:30 05/01/25, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
* Allison Mankin wrote:
The Transport Area requests a Media Type review for the proposed new type application/dialog-info+xml, intended for the IETF tree, and specified http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-sipping-dialog-package-05.txt (Section 8.1).
Why does it list .xml as file extension?
Is there anything wrong with using a .xml extension? If yes, what?
Well, e.g. RFC 3236 states:
[...] It is not recommended that the ".xml" extension (defined in [XMLMIME]) be used, as web servers may be configured to distribute such content as type "text/xml" or "application/xml". [XMLMIME] discusses the unreliability of this approach in section 3. Of course, should the author desire this behaviour, then the ".xml" extension can be used. [...]
Yes, I was surprised I managed to get away with including that, given the penchant for the use of */xml types at the time (and to this day, it seems). The relevant paragraph from section 3 is this; An XML document labeled as text/xml or application/xml might contain namespace declarations, stylesheet-linking processing instructions (PIs), schema information, or other declarations that might be used to suggest how the document is to be processed. For example, a document might have the XHTML namespace and a reference to a CSS stylesheet. Such a document might be handled by applications that would use this information to dispatch the document for appropriate processing. Emphasis on "might". Said another way, there is no specification which licenses a recipient of a */xml-described (say) XHTML document, to infer that the sender intended the message to convey XHTML semantics. Therefore, using a .xml extension provides different semantics than using the .dif extension. Unless this is desirable - which I seriously doubt - I agree that .xml should be excluded. Mark. -- Mark Baker. Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA. http://www.markbaker.ca