Re: Using CONNEG instead of MIME types for compound types & references

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 10:38 AM 5/10/99 -0700, Larry Masinter wrote:
>There are a number of situations where MIME types don't solve the
>problem for "content negotiation" because the XML bodies that are
>transferred will be compound objects that contain multiple kinds
>of markup. In such situations, having a "top level" type other
>than "application/xml" doesn't do any good, since there's no useful
>way to use MIME to describe the combination of elements that are
>contained within.

So long as I can gather from the MIME type that the content I'm getting or
about to get is XML, that's a big step forward.  Multi-part XML doesn't
frighten me, and in hard cases where content negotiation is genuinely
needed, it'll be worth the effort of the many proposals you've noted.

I do not, on the other hand, want to be forced to go through content
negotiation protocols just to find out that a document uses XML syntax.
For short documents, that could be almost as bad as downloading the
document in its entirety.

The beauty of MIME types is that they present a lot of useful information
in a very tiny capsule that's easy to work with. I'd like to make sure they
contain as much useful information as possible without making that capsule
any larger.

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer / Building XML Applications (June)
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http://www.simonstl.com