RFC 2376 (rfc2376) - Page 3 of 15
XML Media Types
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 2376 XML Media Types July 1998
2 Notational Conventions
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC-2119].
3 XML Media Types
This document introduces two new media types for XML entities,
text/xml and application/xml. Registration information for these
media types are described in the sections below.
Every XML entity is suitable for use with the application/xml media
type without modification. But this does not exploit the fact that
XML can be treated as plain text in many cases. MIME user agents
(and web user agents) that do not have explicit support for
application/xml will treat it as application/octet-stream, for
example, by offering to save it to a file.
To indicate that an XML entity should be treated as plain text by
default, use the text/xml media type. This restricts the encoding
used in the XML entity to those that are compatible with the
requirements for text media types as described in [RFC-2045] and
[RFC-2046], e.g., UTF-8, but not UTF-16 (except for HTTP).
XML provides a general framework for defining sequences of structured
data. In some cases, it may be desirable to define new media types
which use XML but define a specific application of XML, perhaps due
to domain-specific security considerations or runtime information.
This document does not prohibit future media types dedicated to such
XML applications. However, developers of such media types are
recommended to use this document as a basis. In particular, the
charset parameter should be used in the same manner.
Within the XML specification, XML entities can be classified into
four types. In the XML terminology, they are called "document
entities", "external DTD subsets", "external parsed entities", and
"external parameter entities". The media types text/xml and
application/xml can be used for any of these four types.
3.1 Text/xml Registration
MIME media type name: text
MIME subtype name: xml
Mandatory parameters: none
Whitehead & Murata Informational