[webkit-dev] Accept Header and application/xml

[Tobias Tom]

Hello,

While developing our web-application framework we implemented content negotiation, based on the accept header. In all webkit based browsers in my tests (Safari, Chrome) the accept header was the same, so I assume it's right to ask the question here. If it's not please forgive me and give me a hint into the right direction. 

The default accept header of webkit seems to be
application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5

Which has as a result that content of the type application/xml and xhtml+xml are the most preferred ones. 

Is there any reason why text/html has a lower quality then application/xml? I can understand the fact that xhtml should be preferred before html, but Webkit itself is not able to render application/xml in a human format anyway (no offense here, I think that's really ok). It is able to render text/html. 

My real-life problem here is the following: A resource is available inside an (machine-optmized) XML format and in (human optimized) HTML format under the same URL. Webkit will always get the XML version. Is there any reason for that? 

From what I understand, removing the application/xml header seems to most reasonable solution. Currently I cannot see any sense in this value because, as mentioned above, webkit isn't even able to render it for humans. 
Even if it could, e.g. like Gecko, shouldn't html be the format of choice for humans?

Thank you very much for your comments.
Tobias