text/xsl vs application/xsl-xml

I asked Murata Makoto, one of the authors (along with our own Simon St.
Laurent) of the XML Media Types Internet Draft at
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-murata-xml-00.txt, to clarify an
ambiguous point in the draft.

The draft is clear on one point: the subtype for XSL documents should be
xsl-xml, not just xsl. But it is not clear on when text/xsl-xml should be
used, as opposed to application/xsl-xml. The only explicit statement on this
subject is "To indicate that an XML entity should be treated as plain text
by default, use the text/xml media type" but there is no mention of whether
the same applies for other XML-based subtypes, or what treatment "as plain
text" means.

Murata responded that he will try to incorporate more information in the
next draft, and he forwarded part of a dialogue he had with Ned Freed, a
co-author of MIME RFCs.

Among other things, Ned said that the text type was originally intended to
be used only when the output would be readable as-is. Of course, readability
is subjective, and he believes that almost all text/richtext, text/enriched,
text/html, text/rtf, and text/css documents are undeserving of the text
type. Ned also believes that XSL should become application/xsl-xml rather
than text/xsl-xml.

Now, since IE5 has already registered text/xsl on MS Windows platforms, I
wonder what the chances are of application/xsl-xml actually being honored.

Anyway, I am just putting this out there for the lurking application
developers who are affected by such things.


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