Re: Finishing the XML-tagging discussion

[ned.freed@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

> > > (b) register a conneg feature tag to indicate XML content;  I would suggest
> > > something along the lines of (XML-namespace="<URI>"), where <URI> is an XML
> > > namespace identifier, as that would allow negotiation to specific XML
> > > applications.

> > Which namespace?  It is already common for documents to refer to more than
> > one XML namespace.

> Hmmm, if you believe this is a good idea, the answer is obvious: the
> namespace of the root element.  The notion of content-negotiation based
> on namespaces had never crossed my mind, but it has a very powerful feel
> to it; surely somebody has thought of this?  Particularly in b2b-land,
> where it seems inevitable that there are going to be several competing
> ways to encode an invoice or a catalogue-enquiry or whatever, each ID'ed
> by namespace. -Tim

This also illustrates another characteristic of conneg -- the simple labels
that work pretty well as a dispatch mechanism in MIME are necessary but
nowhere near sufficient. In this particular case this feature tag is
becoming something that's skewed away from what the -xml suffix provides.

				Ned