I’ve been wondering for a while now that why wasn’t registration of MIME Media Type for DITA included into the 1.1 spec? Methinks it would look something like this.
MIME media type name:
application
MIME subtype name:
dita+xml
Required parameters:
None.
Optional parameters:
charset:
This parameter has identical semantics to the charset parameter of the application/xml media type as specified in [RFC3023].
Encoding considerations:
By virtue of DITA content being XML, it has the same considerations when sent as “application/dita+xml” as does XML. See RFC 3023, section 3.2.
Security considerations:
[Something about conref.]
Interoperability considerations:
[Haven’t thought about this yet.]
Additional information:
Magic number(s):
There is no single initial octet sequence that is always present in DITA documents.
File extension(s):
DITA documents are most often identified with the extensions “.dita” or “.ditamap”.
Macintosh File Type Code(s):
TEXT
Intended usage:
COMMON
Author/Change controller:
The DITA specification is a work product of the OASIS’ DITA TC. The OASIS has change control over these specifications.
This would allow us to change the definition of the format attribute e.g. in links into being a MIME Media Type, not a file extension.
Update
Three years later a MIME Type was added in DITA 1.2.