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Re: well-formedness error


On Sun, 20 Jun 2004 18:19:55 +0900, MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given) <EB2M-MRT@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I think that all  implementations that map ".xml" to text/xml without
the charset param have to be fixed.

I agree, but that's a gigantic task. All web servers I've laid my hands on serves '.html' as 'text/html' and '.xml' as 'text/xml'. All without charset. How do we fix the incredibly large base of installed web servers? I think this is impossible, so let's look at the next step: How do we fix the new versions of existing web server software so that they respect the standards better?

I guess Apache is the easiest server to influence. I have no idea how to influence the IIS developers.

that Atom documents MUST NOT be served with the '.xml' extension?

It is not a bad idea, if you would like be conformant immediately.

What I'm thinking about is what the alternative to '.xml' should be. As '.atom' isn't registered by default, and many users haven't got the possibility to register it themselves, I don't really know what to do.

Application/atom+xml and application/xml look reasonable to me.  If atom
becomes successful, it should not be difficult to map ".atom" to one of
these media types.

Yes, but that's the future. We should probably start influencing the web server developers _now_ and hope that they will have implemented the '.atom' extension mapping when Atom 1.0 is finished. I doubt this will be possible for all web servers, though.

I do not think that this issue can be solved by changing specifications.
If we change MIME, HTTP, and RFC 3023, some implementation might work
correctly.  But other implementations, notably MIME implemenations, will
work incorrectly.

You know what? I don't really care much about MIME. What I care about, is XML over HTTP. If XML over HTTP can't be anything but US-ASCII by default because of some old-school lame-ass MIME implementations, that sucks. Bigtime.

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