Re: Action request: mime-type of xml-dtd should be treated as text

John Peacock wrote:
> Just because, in your experience, XML documents are textual, the RFC's
> clearly state that text/xml is the appropriate mime-type for those
> documents.

That's exactly the crux of our disagreement, I think. Here's the wording
from RFC 3023 (which has obsoleted 2376)

    If an XML document -- that is, the unprocessed, source XML document
    -- is readable by casual users, text/xml is preferable to
    application/xml. MIME user agents (and web user agents) that do not
    have explicit support for text/xml will treat it as text/plain, for
    example, by displaying the XML MIME entity as plain text.
    Application/xml is preferable when the XML MIME entity is unreadable
    by casual users. Similarly, text/xml-external-parsed-entity is
    preferable when an external parsed entity is readable by casual
    users, but application/xml-external-parsed-entity is preferable when
    a plain text display is inappropriate.

       NOTE: Users are in general not used to text containing tags such
       as <price>, and often find such tags quite disorienting or
       annoying. If one is not sure, the conservative principle would
       suggest using application/* instead of text/* so as not to put
       information in front of users that they will quite likely not
       understand.

I don't think that wording has anything to do with whether merging and
diffing is appropriate.

> See, this is the thing I don't understand. Don't set a mime-type on
> your XML or DTD documents, and Subversion will assume they are text and
> let you merge/blame/etc to your heart's content. If you do want/need to
> set the MIME type for some reason, just use 'text/xml' and Subversion
> will be happy to treat the files as text. No one needs to know that the
> MIME type from Subversion's standpoint isn't "precisely accurate".
>
> QED

Except that there is no text/xml-dtd mime type, and text/xml isn't right
for a DTD.

However it's true that we don't at the moment do any processing which is
affected by the mime-type, and so omitting the declaration or setting it
to text/plain is a bearable workround.

Unless you indicate that you'd like to debate this further, I'm going to
let this drop now -- I don't think we are going to reach an agreement,
we have a workround which is adequate, and if you do find time to
implement svn:text-type (thank you for looking into the possibility!)
we'd have an even better one.

-- 
Cheers,
John
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