text/xml. The nuggets are buried in a story about "iTunes":http://www.apple.com/itunes/ and are very interesting. iTunes sends its information out as text/xml. Which is a mistake. It is a legal media type, the W3C(World Wide Web Consortium) is already recommending that you do not use it. It will probably be depreciated.
The problems with it are: * Intervening webservers and caches and proxies are allowed to ?transcode? anything that's advertised as text/anything, which means that a Japanese web server might helpfully transcode it from UTF-8, which it's currently (correctly) encoded as, into say EUC-JIS, greatly reducing the chances that the downstream XML software can handle it. This isn't a common practice, but why leave the door open? * If you send something as text/anything and you don't say what encoding it's in, (with the charset parameter) the receiving software is required to treat it as US-ASCII, which is going to cause breakage if it isn't, and in this case it isn't. Now, Mozilla tells me that this stuff is being served with a charset of ISO-8859-1, which is clearly wrong because the XML header says it's UTF-8.Now, I agree that for large corporations, or for public, corporate, professional applications and sites that if you are using XHTML(eXtensible HyperText Markup Language), XML(eXtensible Markup Language) or anything like that, you should send the correct
mime-type. Especially when it's a money-making application like iTunes. Now, for personal sites, (like this one), I don't believe it's necessary.
Dammit. Now that I'm thinking about it more, I might see the need to do the correct mime-type, as how else are you going to now how to it and see the results? I still have my line in the sand, but I'm getting closer to crossing it.
Tagged As Browsers, Coding, HTML
Comments are Open (2)
Posted at 08:15 AM
Comments
Xian
Personally I don't see any reason to send xhtml pages as application/xml when they are just plain web pages. Text/(x)html is what they are. They aren't application data. However, when when served in an actual application setting (like iTunes) then application/xml seems appropriate.
Text/* mime types have their problems. But when it comes to serving webpages they have less problems than trying to serve them as application/xml. Even if it is 'considered harmful'.
I've always thought of XHTML as a HTML with XML compatibility. Not as XML with HTML compatibility. They should serve their HTML purpose before their XML purpose.
Posted by: Xian | May 9, 2003 01:33 AM
Tony
That was my initial thought on this whole matter as well.
The only thing that gets me all turned around is "Should this be done for a corporate/b2b/application site?". iTunes (mentioned in Brays article) is a good example. They probably OUGHT to be doing the correct mime-type for the browser. That's what standards are for. And I'm a big believer in standards.
But I just don't see the point other than in those rare instances. I think that for serving web pages, it's fine to do without.
I agree compeletely with the thought of HTML with XML compatibility.
Posted by: Tony | May 9, 2003 07:58 AM