Solving the MIME type problem

[Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@xxxxxxx>]

Hi,

  regarding the MIME type discussion on the recent well-formedness
thread, I have had a look at a recent mime.types file of the Apache
web server software. It seems that there is no entry for .atom or
.rss files, which seems to contribute to the problem of incorrect
Content-Type headers.

Given that it is unlikely that everyone would upgrade their HTTP
server once the Atom specification is published as RFC, it seems
that we should ensure that common means to derive the Content-Type
header are timely prepared for Atom, where timely probably means
yesterday...

How do we achieve that? Should someone of this group contact the
Apache Software Foundation to consider including an entry for
the Atom format in the next release of the Apache 2.x and 1.3.x
software packages? Is there an enforced policy that would yield
in a negative response to such a request? I could imagine that
the ASF could reject the request because the MIME type is not yet
registered.

If there is such a policy, would it make sense to ask for using
an experimental type like application/x-atom+xml until the type
is registered (which seems to be acceptable at least for the ASF),
or should we split the MIME type registration into a seperate 
document and move that to an RFC level ASAP? Would our charter
allow that and would the IESG approve such a document even if
the format is not stable yet?

Which other software products should be considered here and how
to deal with them? I think browsers might be a concern, for the
W3C MarkUp Validator it is common that browsers send an
incorrect MIME type when using the file upload functionality,
some send application/octet-stream, some send text/xml without
a charset parameter for an ISO-8859-1 encoded XHTML document and
so on.

If simply contacting the responsible organization, e.g. by filing
feature requests or bug reports, is the way to go here, are there
volunteers to take care of it?

Also, is there an informal document for authors and developers
that explains common pitfalls such as MIME types, character encoding
issues, escaping issues, that would help to avoid such problems, so
that we all can worry less about such conformance issues? If there
is not, what would be the best place for such a document and is
anyone interested in working on it?

regards.