Re: Bad News on IE6 XML Support

[Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net>]

* Joshua Allen wrote:
>Well, step back then -- you acknowledge that text/xsl works on all
>browsers, and text/xml+xslt works on ... none?  So regardless of how
>"right" you are, you would encourage users to do something that would be
>guaranteed to not work? You must envision some immense benefit from the
>use of "text/xml+xslt" that would make it worth trying to get everyone
>to do something that clearly does not work.  I still am wondering what
>browser supports "text/xml+xslt".  So if IE for example supported that
>and disabled text/xsl, would Microsoft get beat up for breaking
>compatibility with Netscape?  Sure thousands of customers would be
>angry, but we could say "we are right and you are wrong."  Certainly it
>is important for us to support text/xml+xslt, but again I think you
>*might* blowing this out of proportion.  I have never heard of a single
>customer saying, "I can't do what I want because IE only supports
>'text/xsl' instead of 'text/xml+xslt'".  It is also highly suspicious
>that there could be any competitive advantage for Microsoft to avoid
>reading the new mime type.  It's an oversight (which seems to affect
>nobody and arguably helps preserve compatibility with other browsers).

IE6 doesn't recognize text/xml nor application/xml as MIME type for XSLT
documents thus forcing developers to ignore a SHOULD from XSLT 1.0, i.e.

  The MIME media types text/xml and application/xml [RFC2376] should be
  used for XSLT stylesheets. It is possible that a media type will be
  registered specifically for XSLT stylesheets; if and when it is, that
  media type may also be used.

IE6 doesn't do this for any good reason. Microsoft implemented text/xsl
and it was the first entity AFAIR that did so. Fine. If you want people
to use that MIME type, you have to enable us, i.e. register the MIME
type through IANA.

The new MIME type for XSLT will by the way be application/xml+xslt, not
text/xml+xslt, at least this is outlined in section 8.17 of RFC 3023,
but I don't see any Internet Draft for the registration of this MIME
type, and I blame the WG hereby for beeing lazy. There isn't any
Internet draft for any SVG MIME type either, so one can't use SVG on the
web today, this is horrible. The SVG recommendation even mandates MIME
types that don't exist.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann { mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de } http://www.bjoernsworld.de
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