Request for review of media sub-type registration request

[Mark Baker]

On 7/14/08, Tim Moses <tim.moses at entrust.com> wrote:
> Bjoern - Thanks for your suggestions.  I will incorporate them into the next version.
>
>  In answer to your question regarding the file extension, the choice of '.xml' facilitates generic XML processing.  RFC3023 talks about this approach extensively.  In particular, an originator who does not have access to a special-purpose application can produce reports and check their schema-validity using only an XML authoring tool.  Likewise for a recipient.

RFC 3023 offers mixed advice there.  It suggests that there could be
some generic processing triggered from the +xml suffix, but also warns
against assuming namespace dispatching on */xml.  It's the latter
point that's the concern here because the Apache mime.types file[1]
(which is reused by other Web servers) associates ".xml" files with
the application/xml media type, meaning that any file using that
extension will be served by that server with that type unless the
default configuration is changed.  As I doubt this is what your users
would want, I would recommend minting a specific file extension so
that the default behaviour is to use this new registered type: try
filext.com.

 [1] https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/httpd/httpd/trunk/docs/conf/mime.types

>
>  In terms of 'magic numbers', I cannot find an example of a registration request that contains magic numbers for xml documents.  I would be happy to follow an example if you are able to direct me to one.

Some registrations pay lip service to it, but in fact there aren't any
magic numbers for XML content.  I'd just say "None".

Mark.