Murata Makoto has announced the latest version of his Internet Draft for XML media types, immediately drawing lively debate on XML-DEV.

The draft, being painstakingly steered through the narrow waters between the IETF and W3C, describes media types for XML documents and fragments. Revisions in this latest draft include:

• Escaped XPointers for fragment identifiers for text/xml and application/xml
• The base URI may be embedded in text/xml, application/xml, text/xml-external-parsed-entity, or application/xml-external-parsed-entity
• Change of -xml suffix to |xml

The first two changes, added at the request of the W3C's XML Core Working Group, drew some disappointed comment from Rick Jelliffe, who was also of the opinion that the draft was a retrograde move as far as internationalization was concerned:

The current draft is a step backwards for internationalization of the WWW in practise. Or, at least, it makes life simpler for ASCII users but much more difficult for us non-ASCII users.

Read more at the IETF XML-MIME mailing list.