Re: Namespace and media types

[Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@xxxxxxx>]

* Mark Baker wrote:
>Because the namespace and the media type are orthogonal; you shouldn't
>use one to do the others job, and can't without creating ambiguity
>(read; security) and performance problems.

And interoperability problems. Say you want to do content negotiation,
http://example.org/feed is both, an Atom document and a RSS document,
delivering both as application/xml is difficult and a user agent that
sends only Accept: application/xml or just Accept: */* would have a
problem too. Worse because you cannot reliably ask the server which
representations are available...

>The media type is used by the message sender to indicate the intended
>semantic contribution of the encapsulated document to the overall
>semantics of the message.  So a HTTP GET response message using a media
>type of, say, "text/plain" to carry an XHTML document, is telling the
>recipient that the sender of that message only meant to communicate
>some plain text, and therefore *not* invoke the XHTML 1.0 specification.

I would rather say that media types identify the nature of a resource...