Overview

text/xml is another media type for XML documents; the format matches application/xml but the default encoding and semantics differ. It is used when human-readable XML is intended, though application/xml is preferred today.

Details

RFC 7303 defines both text/xml and application/xml. Historically, text/* types defaulted to US-ASCII when charset was unspecified. So sending UTF-8-encoded XML as text/xml without charset could, per spec, be interpreted as US-ASCII and garble non-ASCII characters. Because of this pitfall, application/xml — which determines encoding from the document's own XML declaration — has been preferred since RFC 7303.

In practice most XML parsers treat the two identically, and some legacy systems such as SOAP still use text/xml. For new services it is safer to declare UTF-8 explicitly or to serve as application/xml.

Syntax

e.g. Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8

File extensions

Notes

• text/xml may in theory be treated as US-ASCII when charset is omitted, risking garbled non-ASCII text — always declare charset=utf-8.
• New services should prefer application/xml for encoding safety; text/xml is mainly for legacy compatibility.
• XML parser security risks such as XXE apply the same as with application/xml (disable external entities).

Related types

Related headers