Re: well-formedness error

[Asbjørn Ulsberg <asbjorn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 19 Jun 2004 20:16:11 +0200, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@xxxxxx>  
wrote:

> Depends on the Web server. Anyway, don't use the extension "xml" if that  
> is a problem.

What extension should one use then, I ask? If you have absolutely NO way  
of configuring your web server, how will you be able to serve the right  
content-type for your Atom feeds? Giving the feed '.xml' extension leaves  
it to be served as 'text/xml' and thus parsed as US-ASCII, and giving it  
'.atom' leaves it to be served as 'text/plain' or  
'application/octet-stream' which either gives you US-ASCII or no encoding  
specified at all (afaik). Which one do you choose?

> Server behaviour that maps file extension to a content type is an  
> implementation detail.

It's not a «detail». It's of major importance. Extension-mapping is the de  
facto standard for MIME type serving today. Apache does it. IIS does it.  
I'm sure Sun One, WebSphere and others do the same as well.

> The spec should simply state the correct content-type  
> ("application/...+xml"),
> that's it.

You can't have that content-type on statically served web pages. You just  
can't.

> As long as it isn't text/*, that's fine.

And then you're stuck with US-ASCII, no matter what the characters in the  
XML is encoded with, and no matter what you state in the processing  
instruction. Which means that statically served web pages can _only_ be in  
english, and never include terms or words from other languages.

> Again, as long as the content isn't served as "text/*", there is no  
> problem.

Yes, that's the whole problem. 'text/*' demands US-ASCII.

> Just pick an "application/*" content type and stick with it.

We could pick 'julian-and-asbjorn/having-fun-at-the-beach' and it wouldn't  
matter. Statically served feeds will either be served as 'text/xml',  
'text/plain' or 'application/octet-stream' depending on the feed file's  
extension. Which one do you fancy most?

--
Asbjørn Ulsberg         -=|=-        asbjornu@xxxxxxxxxxx
«He's a loathsome offensive brute, yet I can't look away»