XML and MIME

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

1 XML
2 MIME
3 XML Specific MIME Types
4 External links

[edit] XML

Main article: XML

An XML document is a text document that consists of an XML declaration and a root element with well-formed content.

Example XML Document

     <?xml version="1.0"?>
     <root>
           Blah
     </root>

[edit] MIME

Main article: MIME

MIME is an Internet Standard that allows email systems to interpret complex data. Web browsers also use the MIME type to accurately display information or launch a separate application to handle the data.

All MIME types (called Internet media type) consist of two parts, in the form type/subtype.

This information is sent to the browser by a web server. Usually, the server determines the MIME type based on the document's file extension. For example, the server would interpret an extension of .txt (plain text file) to have a MIME type of text/plain.

[edit] XML Specific MIME Types

There are two MIME assignments for XML data. These are:

application/xml (RFC 3023)
text/xml (RFC 3023)

Because of the wide variety of documents that can be expressed using an XML syntax, additional MIME types are needed to differentiate between languages. XML-based formats add a suffix of +xml to the MIME type.

The followings are some examples of common XML media types.

Registered
- Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML): application/xhtml+xml (RFC 3236)
- Atom: application/atom+xml (RFC 4287)

Registration-In-Progress
- Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT): application/xslt+xml
- Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG): image/svg+xml