XML - Use On The Internet

Use On The Internet

XML has come into common use for the interchange of data over the Internet. RFC 3023 gives rules for the construction of Internet Media Types for use when sending XML. It also defines the media types application/xml and text/xml, which say only that the data are in XML, and nothing about its semantics. The use of text/xml has been criticized as a potential source of encoding problems and it has been suggested that it should be deprecated.

RFC 3023 also recommends that XML-based languages be given media types ending in +xml; for example image/svg+xml for SVG.

Further guidelines for the use of XML in a networked context may be found in RFC 3470, also known as IETF BCP 70; this document is very wide-ranging and covers many aspects of designing and deploying an XML-based language.