RFC 2376 (rfc2376) - Page 2 of 15

XML Media Types

RFC 2376                    XML Media Types                    July 1998


   7 REFERENCES .....................................................13
   8 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...............................................14
   9 ADDRESSES OF AUTHORS ...........................................14
   10 FULL COPYRIGHT STATEMENT ......................................15

1  Introduction

   The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has issued a Recommendation
   [REC-XML] which defines the Extensible Markup Language (XML), version
   1. To enable the exchange of XML network entities, this document
   proposes two new media types, text/xml and application/xml.

   XML entities are currently exchanged on the World Wide Web, and XML
   is also used for property values and parameter marshalling by the
   WebDAV protocol for remote web authoring. Thus, there is a need for a
   media type to properly label the exchange of XML network entities.
   (Note that, as sometimes happens between two communities, both MIME
   and XML have defined the term entity, with different meanings.)

   Although XML is a subset of the Standard Generalized Markup Language
   (SGML) [ISO-8897], and currently is assigned the media types
   text/sgml and application/sgml, there are several reasons why use of
   text/sgml or application/sgml to label XML is inappropriate. First,
   there exist many applications which can process XML, but which cannot
   process SGML, due to SGML's larger feature set. Second, SGML
   applications cannot always process XML entities, because XML uses
   features of recent technical corrigenda to SGML.  Third, the
   definition of text/sgml and application/sgml [RFC-1874] includes
   parameters for SGML bit combination transformation format (SGML-
   bctf), and SGML boot attribute (SGML-boot). Since XML does not use
   these parameters, it would be ambiguous if such parameters were given
   for an XML entity.  For these reasons, the best approach for labeling
   XML network entities is to provide new media types for XML.

   Since XML is an integral part of the WebDAV Distributed Authoring
   Protocol, and since World Wide Web Consortium Recommendations have
   conventionally been assigned IETF tree media types, and since similar
   media types (HTML, SGML) have been assigned IETF tree media types,
   the XML media types also belong in the IETF media types tree.












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