Received: (qmail 21616 invoked by uid 501); 27 Oct 2001 23:44:25 -0000
Message-Id: <20011027234425.21612.qmail@apache.org>
Date: 27 Oct 2001 23:44:25 -0000
From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
Reply-To: elharo@metalab.unc.edu
To: submit@bugz.apache.org
Subject: application/xml should be preferred to text/xml
X-Send-Pr-Version: 3.110

>Number:         8627
>Category:       config
>Synopsis:       application/xml should be preferred to text/xml
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       serious
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    apache
>State:          closed
>Quarter:        
>Keywords:       
>Date-Required:
>Class:          duplicate
>Submitter-Id:   apache
>Arrival-Date:   Mon Oct 29 00:00:02 PST 2001
>Closed-Date:    Mon Oct 29 07:11:40 PST 2001
>Last-Modified:  Mon Oct 29 07:11:40 PST 2001
>Originator:     elharo@metalab.unc.edu
>Release:        2.0.16-beta
>Organization:
>Environment:
All
>Description:
When an HTTP server identifies a file as having MIME type text/xml without an explicit charset part, then browsers/parsers are required by RFC 3023 to assume that the encoding of the document is US-ASCII, even when the XML document itself says otherwise. This is incorrect for almost all XML documents. In practice some browsers such as IE correctly implement the spec and thus exhibit this problem while others such as Mozilla do not. 

If an XML document is identified as application/xml without an explicit charset part, then all browsers/parsers behave the same and look in the XML document itself to determine the encoding. This is much more consistent in practice, and presents users with more predictable, acceptable behavior. Therefore application/xml should be the default MIME media type distributed with Apache for XML documents, not text/xml as is currently the case. 

This has recently been discussed in detail on the xml-dev mailing list beginning with http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200110/msg00919.html

Since both text/xml and application/xml are registered MIME types at the IANA and have been for some time, this is not technically a bug in Apache. However, text/xml does exercise bugs in many XML parsers, conflict with users' expectations, and is difficult toi fix in many environmnents. Since applicaiton/xml is equally correct and does not have any of these problems, it should be preferred. 

>How-To-Repeat:
http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200110/msg00919.html
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3023.txt
>Fix:
Change mime.types to map .xml and .xsl to application/xml instead of text/xml
>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
State-Changed-From-To: open-closed
State-Changed-By: slive
State-Changed-When: Mon Oct 29 07:11:40 PST 2001
State-Changed-Why:
Dupe of PR 8626
Class-Changed-From-To: change-request-duplicate
Class-Changed-By: slive
Class-Changed-When: Mon Oct 29 07:11:40 PST 2001
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