Article:		XML on the Web Has Failed
Subject:		RFC 3023 is broken and wrong
Date:		2004-11-17 12:33:17
From:		stealthbrady
How many of those feeds would be fixed if the Content-type were changed to 'application/xml' (from text/plain, or text/xml)? All? Most? Many? That's just a transition from handling .xml -> as 'text/xml' versus 'application/xml'. That the client-side libraries aren't respecting the MIME-type is a nuisance, perhaps, but not the end of the world. And I would expect that, over time, these feeds will be becoming more valid, not less valid. And as for the client-side libraries; as the default web server settings tend more towards generalized correctness, so too will client-side libraries, beginning, perhaps eventually, to reject data with improper character encodings. To say that XML has failed 'utterly, miserably, completely', I would figure the success/failure percentages would have to go in the opposite direction - that XML feeds should be validating less and less often. For your argument to hold water, you should show your rates over time.

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