David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk> wrote:

>> Content snippets should therefore be served as text/plain, the fact that
>> the snippet *may* contain markup is irrelevant. The application is the
>
>Opaque content should be served as application/octet-stream.  text/plain
>should be used for material that doesn't contain markup.  That's what plain
>means.

It makes no sense to serve a "foo" content fragment as text/plain and
"<em>foo</em>" as something else. In the context of a content fragment
both are just plain text.

>However, the arguments for the use of the external entity type make sense
>to me.  I agree that the ones originally suggested are wrong.
>
>> only tool that should have access to the content snippets, it's
>> configuration should ensure how the snippet is handled (i.e. included
>> verbatim without parsing it or doing anything else to it).
>
>An application transcluding fragments might well treat plain text as 
>CDATA, or as completely devoid of XML codes, whereas when transcluding 
>XHTML fragments would parse the content.

Sorry, "transclude" or "transcluding" is not in my dictionaries.

-- 
Spartanicus