text/xhtml+xml vs. application/xhtml+xml: msg#00015 ietf.xml-mime

Mark, I would appreciate if the HTML WG could provide a little more context
on their thinking, perhaps by adding to discussion to the eventual XHTML
MIME registration.

First, I'm not convinced that text/ is the correct top-level type. Section
3 of <http://www.imc.org/draft-murata-xml> says:

If an XML document -- that is, the unprocessed, source XML document
-- is readable by casual users, text/xml is preferable to
application/xml. MIME user agents (and web user agents) that do not
have explicit support for text/xml will treat it as text/plain, for
example, by displaying the XML entity as plain text. Application/xml
is preferable when the XML MIME entity is unreadable by casual
users. Similarly, text/xml-external-parsed-entity is preferable when
an external parsed entity is readable by casual users, but
application/xml-external-parsed-entity is preferable when a plain
text display is inappropriate.

NOTE: Users are in general not used to text containing tags such
as <price>, and often find such tags quite disorienting or
annoying. If one is not sure, the conservative principle would
suggest using application/* instead of text/* so as not to put
information in front of users that they will quite likely not
understand.

Using the canonical mother example, I know that my mother, who does not mind
looking at <http://www.dankohn.com/>, would be upset if her mailer revealed
the ugly innards:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd";>
<html
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml";
xml:lang="en">
<head>
<meta
name="generator"
content="HTML Tidy, see www.w3.org" />
<meta
http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>
Dan Kohn's Home Page
</title>
...

It seems like application/* is thus the safer bet. Moreover, section 2.11
of <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml> already standardizes end-of-line handling,
so the canonicalization of line endings that text/* supports does not seem
necessary.

Also, I would like to see some detailed discussion of when to use
application/xhtml+xml and when to use text/html. This seems like an upward
compatibility challenge of exceeding subtlety, and may deserve more
attention than it received in your IRC conversation.

Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide into your and the WG's
thinking.

- dan
--
Dan Kohn <mailto:dan@xxxxxxxxxxx>
<http://www.dankohn.com> <tel:+1-650-327-2600>

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