On Di, 2005-11-22 at 16:08 +0100, Eric van der Vlist wrote: > I came on the share mime type database no later than yesterday and I > hope I am not raising a permathread (that doesn't seem to be the case > according to my googling, but you can never know!)... > > The "text/xml" mime type is often considered harmful and many people > prefer to use application/xml instead. > > The reason why this is the case is that mime types are still described > by the RFC 2045 and 2046 and that RFC 2046 says that the default > encoding for all the text/* types is ASCII: > > "The default character set, which must be assumed in the absence of a > charset parameter, is US-ASCII." > > Being conform to this statement means that any "text/xml" document > served on an HTTP server that do not specify a charset or a file system > that doesn't provide this information MUST be considered as ASCII and > that invalidates a majority of XML documents (at least out of English > speaking countries). > > This has been commented a couple of articles on XML.com: > > * http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/07/21/dive.html > * http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/06/08/restful.html > > I don't know the implications of making such a change on existing > applications, but the a suggestion would be to declare the XML type as > "application/xml" with an alias "text/xml" and having "text/plain" as a > sub class. > > Would that make sense?
Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us! Unfortunately, I think many implementations are broken wrt this very subtle RFC detail. For now, I've decided to make "application/xml" the main XML MIME type, add "text/xml" as an alias, and make all the previously "text/xml" subclassed MIME types descendants of "application/xml" [1,2]. I think charset detection is really out of scope for our MIME package. [1] http://cvs.freedesktop.org/mime/shared-mime-info/freedesktop.org.xml.in?r1=1.98&r2=1.99 [2] http://cvs.freedesktop.org/mime/shared-mime-info/ChangeLog?r1=1.152&r2=1.154 > PS: I am wondering how you deal with these charset issues beyond XML and > may have missed something here, see: > http://eric.van-der-vlist.com/blog/1614_The_complex_simple_problem_of_media_types.item -- Christian Neumair <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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