Network Working Group                                     E. Whitehead
Request for Comments: 2376                                   UC Irvine
Category: Informational                                      M. Murata
                                              Fuji Xerox Info. Systems
                                                             July 1998


                            XML Media Types

Status of this Memo

   This memo provides information for the Internet community.  It does
   not specify an Internet standard of any kind.  Distribution of this
   memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1998).  All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

   This document proposes two new media subtypes, text/xml and
   application/xml, for use in exchanging network entities which are
   conforming Extensible Markup Language (XML). XML entities are
   currently exchanged via the HyperText Transfer Protocol on the World
   Wide Web, are an integral part of the WebDAV protocol for remote web
   authoring, and are expected to have utility in many domains.

Table of Contents

   1 INTRODUCTION ....................................................2
   2 NOTATIONAL CONVENTIONS ..........................................3
   3 XML MEDIA TYPES .................................................3
   3.1  Text/xml Registration ........................................3
   3.2  Application/xml Registration .................................6
   4 SECURITY CONSIDERATIONS .........................................8
   5 THE BYTE ORDER MARK (BOM) AND CONVERSIONS TO/FROM UTF-16 ........9
   6 EXAMPLES ........................................................9
   6.1  text/xml with UTF-8 Charset .................................10
   6.2  text/xml with UTF-16 Charset ................................10
   6.3  text/xml with ISO-2022-KR Charset ...........................10
   6.4  text/xml with Omitted Charset ...............................11
   6.5  application/xml with UTF-16 Charset .........................11
   6.6  application/xml with ISO-2022-KR Charset ....................11
   6.7  application/xml with Omitted Charset and UTF-16 XML Entity ..12
   6.8  application/xml with Omitted Charset and UTF-8 Entity .......12
   6.9  application/xml with Omitted Charset and Internal Encoding
   Declaration.......................................................12




 
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,