What Content-Type value should I send for my XML sitemap

Question

I thought I should send  text xml   but then I read that I should send  application xml   Does it matter  Can someone explain the difference

User · Answer

As a rule of thumb  the safest bet towards making your document be treated properly by all web servers  proxies  and client browsers  is probably the following    Use the application xml content type Include a character encoding in the content type  probably UTF-8 Include a matching character encoding in the encoding attribute of the XML document itself    In terms of the RFC 3023 spec  which some browsers fail to implement properly  the  major difference in the content types is in how clients are supposed to treat the character encoding  as follows   For application xml  application xml-dtd  application xml-external-parsed-entity  or any one of the subtypes of application xml such as application atom xml  application rss xml or application rdf xml  the character encoding is determined in this order    the encoding given in the charset parameter of the Content-Type HTTP header the encoding given in the encoding attribute of the XML declaration within the document  utf-8    For text xml  text xml-external-parsed-entity  or a subtype like text foo xml  the encoding attribute of the XML declaration within the document is ignored  and the character encoding is    the encoding given in the charset parameter of the Content-Type HTTP header  or us-ascii    Most parsers don t implement the spec  they ignore the HTTP Context-Type and just use the encoding in the document  With so many ill-formed documents out there  that s unlikely to change any time soon

User · Answer

The difference between text xml and application xml is the default character encoding if the charset parameter is omitted      Text xml and application xml behave differently when the charset   parameter is not explicitly specified   If the default charset  i e     US-ASCII  for text xml is inconvenient for some reason  e g   bad web   servers   application xml provides an alternative  see  Optional   parameters  of application xml registration in Section 3 2     For text xml      Conformant with  RFC2046   if a text xml entity is received with   the charset parameter omitted  MIME processors and XML processors   MUST use the default charset value of  us-ascii  ASCII    In cases   where the XML MIME entity is transmitted via HTTP  the default   charset value is still  us-ascii     For application xml      If an application xml entity is received where the charset   parameter is omitted  no information is being provided about the   charset by the MIME Content-Type header   Conforming XML   processors MUST follow the requirements in section 4 3 3 of  XML    that directly address this contingency   However  MIME processors   that are not XML processors SHOULD NOT assume a default charset if   the charset parameter is omitted from an application xml entity    So if the charset parameter is omitted  the character encoding of text xml is US-ASCII while with application xml the character encoding can be specified in the document itself   Now a rule of thumb on the internet is     Be strict with the output but be tolerant with the input     That means make sure to meet the standards as much as possible when delivering data over the internet  But build in some mechanisms to overlook faults or to guess when receiving and interpreting data over the internet   So in your case just pick one of the two types  I recommend application xml  and make sure to specify the used character encoding properly  I recommend to use the respective default character encoding to play safe  so in case of application xml use UTF-8 or UTF-16

User · Answer

both are fine   text xxx means that in case the program does not understand xxx it makes sense to show the file to the user as plain text  application xxx means that it is pointless to show it   Please note that those content-types were originally defined for E-Mail attachment before they got later used in Web world

User · Answer

text xml is for documents that would be meaningful to a human if presented as text without further processing  application xml is for everything else     Every XML entity is suitable for use with the application xml media     type without modification   But this does not exploit the fact that     XML can be treated as plain text in many cases   MIME user agents      and web user agents  that do not have explicit support for     application xml will treat it as application octet-stream  for     example  by offering to save it to a file       To indicate that an XML entity should be treated as plain text by     default  use the text xml media type   This restricts the encoding     used in the XML entity to those that are compatible with the     requirements for text media types as described in  RFC-2045  and      RFC-2046   e g   UTF-8  but not UTF-16  except for HTTP         http   www ietf org rfc rfc2376 txt

User · Answer

Other answers here address the general question of what the proper Content-Type for an XML response is  and conclude  as with What  39 s the difference between text xml vs application xml for webservice response  that both text xml and application xml are permissible  However  none address whether there are any rules specific to sitemaps   Answer  there aren t  The sitemap spec is https   www sitemaps org  and using Google site  searches you can confirm that it does not contain the words or phrases mime  mimetype  content-type  application xml  or text xml anywhere  In other words  it is entirely silent on the topic of what Content-Type should be used for serving sitemaps   In the absence of any commentary in the sitemap spec directly addressing this question  we can safely assume that the same rules apply as when choosing the Content-Type of any other XML document - i e  that it may be either text xml or application xml

[xml] What Content-Type value should I send for my XML sitemap?

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