RE: Bad News on IE6 XML Support

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

At 10:08 PM 07/09/01 -0700, Joshua Allen wrote:
>Anyway, sorry if I am missing something, but as far as I can tell there
>is not even a media type for XSLT yet (and the RFC says that the media
>type in the example SHOULD NOT be used until a real media type gets
>registered).  And again, I may be missing something major, but why
>wouldn't text/xsl+xml be the natural thing that got registered, since
>that is the de-facto standard now anyway?  Please accept my very sincere
>apologies if I am stepping on some ground that has been hashed over and
>is contentious; I am just curious?

Sigh, these media-type RFC's take a long time.  Presumably the
policies laid down in RFC 3023 will help.  But it'll take a while... 
text/xslt+xml seems like the most natural way to go, but I can see 
a case for application/ or xsl+, so there are a few permutations.  
I've learned that this whole media-type selection thing is deeper 
than it looks and so the time consumed is not entirely unreasonable.

Given this, it's hard to get too mad at anyone over their choice of 
XSL media-type values in shipping products.  Having said that, once 
there is an RFC, failure to recognize that media-type would be a 
grave sin indeed. -Tim

PS: doesn't mean that IE6 is in *any* way justified in accepting
non-WF data as "XML".  That's unforgivable, contemptuous, and
stupid.  Let's see, on one hand Ballmer is on stages everywhere 
saying that XML is the core framework for e-business, and at the 
same time the IE group is shipping product in a mode that
undermines one of the core principles that makes XML usable -
that data is either WF or it's crap.  The next step will be to
make end-tags optional because that will be more comfortable 
for the FrontPage users out there.  Feh.  Really disgusting.