What s the difference between text xml vs application xml for webservice response

Question

This is more of a general question about the difference between text xml and application xml  I am fairly new to writing webservices  REST - Jersey   I have been producing application xml since it is what shows up in most tutorials   code examples that I have been using to learn  but I recently found out about text xml and was wondering what is different about it and when would you use it over application xml

User · Accepted Answer

This is an old question  but one that is frequently visited and clear recommendations are now available from RFC 7303 which obsoletes RFC3023  In a nutshell  section 9 2    The registration information for text xml is in all respects the same as that given for application xml above  Section 9 1   except that the  Type name  is  text

User · Answer

According to this article application xml is preferred     EDIT  I did a little follow-up on the article    The author claims that the encoding declared in XML processing instructions  like    lt  xml version  1 0  encoding  UTF-8   gt    can be ignored when text xml media type is used   They support the thesis with the definition of text   MIME type family specification in RFC 2046  specifically the following fragment   4 1 2   Charset Parameter     A critical parameter that may be specified in the Content-Type field    for  text plain  data is the character set   This is specified with a     charset  parameter  as in        Content-type  text plain  charset iso-8859-1     Unlike some other parameter values  the values of the charset    parameter are NOT case sensitive   The default character set  which    must be assumed in the absence of a charset parameter  is US-ASCII      The specification for any future subtypes of  text  must specify    whether or not they will also utilize a  charset  parameter  and may    possibly restrict its values as well   For other subtypes of  text     than  text plain   the semantics of the  charset  parameter should be    defined to be identical to those specified here for  text plain      i e   the body consists entirely of characters in the given charset     In particular  definers of future  text  subtypes should pay close    attention to the implications of multioctet character sets for their    subtype definitions    According to them  such difficulties can be avoided when using application xml MIME type  Whether it s true or not  I wouldn t go as far as to avoid text xml  IMHO  it s best just to follow the semantics of human-readability non-readability  and always remember to specify the charset

User · Answer

application xml is seen by svn as binary type whereas text xml as text file for which a diff can be displayed

User · Answer

From the RFC  3023   under section 3  XML Media Types      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     emphasis mine

[xml] What's the difference between text/xml vs application/xml for webservice response

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