Actually, re-reading some of the RFCs, I would clarify one thing.

It seems like using unregistered "x-" MIME type is discouraged, and 
instead you are encouraged to use what is (claimed to be) a very quick 
and easy and painless process of registering "vnd." types.  So I'd 
encourage LC to investigate doing that for MARC, while waiting for 
someone to have time to do an actual (more time consuming) 
application/marc+xml registration. That would give us the beneift of an 
actual registration (albeit under vnc.) instead of an unregistered x-.

As far as text/xml, the general consensus on the internet seems to be 
that it was a mistake, but it's there and no one cares enough to try to 
somehow remove it, so it _is_ legal, but nobody really encourages using 
it.  One problem with text/html is that it's default char encoding is 
ascii, while the default char encoding for XML is of course UTF-8. This 
can very easily lead to confusion and encoding errors unless software is 
more careful than we know most software has a tendency to be. :)  Still, 
it's legal, but I don't see any reason to encourage it's use for MARC. 

application/xml, sure, but it would be _really_ useful, for the reasons 
discussed in last week's thread, to have a specific type for marc xml 
(and mods).  If the folks at LC don't understand why, thinking that 
application/xml is sufficient, i could try to write up a persuasive 
essay again, or copy and paste from last week's thread. Or is there 
someone else other than LC who could conceivably fill out an application 
for application/marc+xml and application/mods_xml?

Seriously, application/xml is not sufficient, although it is legal.

Jonathan

Alexander Johannesen wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 22:32, Jonathan Rochkind <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>   
>> Didn't we finish having this conversation last week? We talked about all
>> this stuff being brought up now last week.
>>     
>
> We did indeed, and your summary is better than what my retort could
> have been; spot on.
>
> I guess it's hard to understand why text/xml is such a waste of MIME
> and time as long as we still got text/html as the original understood
> MIME for HTML pages, but luckily the internet has moved on and
> evolved. :)
>
> One question we haven't asked is if we really need a MIME type for MARCXML. :)
>
>
> Alex
> --
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