RE: text/xhtml+xml vs. application/xhtml+xml

On Wed, 1 Nov 2000, Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote:

> The point is that there is a use driven by a need. 

Can I jump on my hobby horse and say that text/html does serve a useful
purpose, but perhaps it is not the purpose for which it was created but
merely a side-effect: that being that it signals that transcoding and
newline massaging is allowed, in effect.

If it turns out that HTML does not fit into the definition or intent of
the text/* type, then I suggest that the definition of text/* does not
capture practise enough.  

Perhaps it would be better to redefine text/* to clarify that readability
by naive readers is not the defining characteristic, but that the freedom
of intermediate systems to transcode it (perhaps even at the cost of
losing characters, how awful) is.  The distinction therefore should be
the old, useful one of "text" versus "binary" with application/* being
binary.

Making text/* rely on being naively readable makes it only useful for
plain text and Wiki. 

Rick Jelliffe