proposed media type: application/exi

[Mark Baker]

On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 9:28 PM, Martin Duerst <duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp> wrote:
> Hello Carine,
>
> At the moment, just a questions:
>
> Given that there are many types of the form application/foo+xml,
> will we see proposals for application/foo+exi in the future?

That's a great question.

In hindsight, I believe it was an error to mint application/xml and
text/xml for XML content.  While there are valid uses cases for them,
they are rare in practice (similar reasons to why one would need to
deliver HTML content as text/plain).  But every single time I've seen
them used in the wild was in error, and should have instead been a
format-specific type like application/xhtml+xml or
application/atom+xml.

It naturally follows that I don't think EXI should have its own media
type.  That's not to say I believe we need a "+exi" suffix though,
seeing as a) the value of the "+xml" suffix has been negligible, and
b) it's not clear that EXI is going to be popular.

Mark.