What content-type should be used for XML+XSL presentation?

Question

I'm trying to render XML+XSL 2.0 in browser, returning .xml pages with application/xml content type and .xsl pages with text/xml. Safari is complaining for the main document: "Resource interpreted as document but transferred with MIME type application/xml." (but keeps rendering everything just fine).

I want to get rid of this warning message. What content-types should be used for the XML document?

Slinkman

Does "XML+XSL 2.0" mean that you use XSLT 2.0? Is there any browser that supports XSLT 2.0? – Lavalley

No browser support, but Saxon CE (alpha) provides XSLT 2.0 in the browser: saxonica.com – Zealot

Safari 5 and Chrome 15 work fine with XSLT 2.0 (on Mac) – Slinkman

Answer 1

I've had success using text/xml with the stylesheet as text/xsl (or perhaps this is OK as text/xml as you have it working). text/xsl is widely recognized, but not "official" (as far as I understand it).

According to RFC 3023: "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."

See https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3023#page-16

Selfexistent

text/xsl for an XML document?? – Slinkman

Sorry - for the stylesheet. And text/xml for the instance document. – Selfexistent

According to RFC 3023: "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." tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3023#page-16 – Selfexistent

Updated answer to reflect above comments. – Selfexistent

Answer 2

Peeking into the WebKit source, it's easy to see what MIME types are considered valid for each resource type. It's not a very big list.

The following 4 MIME types are supported for "Documents":

• text/html
• text/xml
• text/plain
• application/xhtml+xml

There are only 2 valid types for stylesheets:

• text/css
• text/xsl

Obviously, the text/html, text/plain, and text/css types don't really apply here.

If you're really just interested in silencing the warnings, sending the .xml document as text/xml and the .xsl document as text/xsl should do the trick.

On the other hand, you concede that everything's rendering fine, so you might consider the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" strategy.

Rhinoceros

Answer 3

For what it's worth, the correct media type for XSLT would actually be application/xslt+xml, according to https://www.w3.org/TR/2007/REC-xslt20-20070123/#media-type-registration as per the official IANA registry https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml. And that's not new, the registration dates back to at least 2007. However, browser support for application/xslt+xml is almost non-existent.

Greyhound

Answer 4

Before any transformation i do this in PHP:

header("Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8");

the part with uft-8 is important ...

Steapsin

That would apply if he did server-side transformation of XML to XHTML, and even then it would be problematic (IE/MSHTML does not support that MIME type). There is no "uft-8", but the "utf-8" in your code is only correct if the output actually is UTF-8-encoded. Which is not a requirement for XHTML. You did not answer the question. – Claudclauddetta