Subject: Media type treatment in the processing model

From: Ian Davis <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2005 15:12:34 +0100

Rule 5 of the Processing Model states that media types beginning with 
'text/' cannot contain child elements.

This seems to imply that well-formed WML documents cannot be transported 
as XML, but must be escaped. WML uses a media type of text/vnd.wap-wml 
which was overlooked by RFC3023 so falls outside of rule 4 of the 
processing model.

Is this a correct analysis?

Also, I note that any content with the a media type starting with 
'message/' (e.g. message/rfc822) has to be base 64 encoded which unusual.

Ian
-- 
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Working on... Silkworm <http://silkworm.talis.com/>

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From: Graham <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2005 20:08:34 +0100

We have simple rules so that for any media type there is only a  
single possible encoding method that everyone agrees upon. This means  
clients can know exactly any type of content they come across was  
encoded. If there are media types that don't fit the normal pattern  
of naming, they may end up using an illogical encoding method.

I don't necessarily support this arrangement, but it's definitely far  
superior to what we had before where the publisher could choose any  
method which made decoding at the client tremendously complicated.

Graham