xml-dev - Re: Schema at XML namespace URI to change

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

At 06:14 PM 10/24/00 -0400, Ian Graham wrote:
>I would be very much against using content negotiation to do this, as this
>just avoids the real problem -- that current negotiation schemes cannot
>exchange the information needed to select one of many text/xml variants.  
>This is in part an HTTP design issue, and I'm sure the HTTP working group
>is looking into this sort of issue (teh simplest, and no doubt wrong way
>to do this would be to ad some sort of XMLnamespace: header field to the
>HTTP header, to define requests/responses for XML 'subtypes').  The
>proposal to use text/xml-dtd (etc.) MIME types is an obvious workaround
>for this -- but is likely not an appropriate long-term solution. 

XML MIME Types are getting an upgrade in general - you might want to explore:
http://www.imc.org/ietf-xml-mime/
http://www.imc.org/draft-murata-xml
(also http://www.ietf.org/iesg/iesg.2K-10-05, item 2.)

If we have application/xsd+xml, application/xdr+xml, application/xml-dtd,
etc., I'm a lot less concerned about the usefulness of MIME types as a
technical solution to this set of XML identification problems.

I agree that we're still a long ways from a more comprehensive solution
that identifies all of the namespaces used in a document, however.  Given
the nature of the difficulties we had in getting to the +xml suffix, I'm
not sure it'll be easy to get something more comprehensive built. See the
archive for details, notably 
http://www.imc.org/ietf-xml-mime/mail-archive/threads.html#00200

CC/PP may fix this for us eventually...

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
XHTML: Migrating Toward XML
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books