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> Thus, the official
> MIME type assignment to XML data is:
> application/xml
This is only the case (possibly the minority of cases) where there isn't
a more specific mime type (either registered or in use in the wild)
so XHTML documents are XML but may be
text/html (grr:-) or application/xhtml+xml
XSLT documents are XML but may be
text/xsl (never registered) or application/xsl+xml
SVG documents are XML but may be image/svg+xml
etc...
In some cases you may be able to tell (or guess) from the media type
name that the document is XML, for example if it follows the ...+xml
convention of RFC 3023, but in general the only way to know if a
document format identified by a media type is XML or not is to look up
the media type registration and read the text.
Basically Media types were not designed for XML and are a pretty bad
fit. If you lable everything as application/xml then they lose their
original purpose of being able to trigger an appropriate program
to handle the data, you typically do not want to send SVG and ChemML to
the same viewing application. Conversely if you lable each vocabulary
with a different mime type, there has never really been a good answer to
give to the question of what mime type you give to a
xhtml+xlink+svg+mathml document.
David
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