Re: Draft Proposal for Assigning Media Types

On Mar 30, 2004, at 5:26 PM, Anish Karmarkar wrote:

> Mark Nottingham wrote:
>
>> That's an issue, not a requirement. The question I was trying to get 
>> to was whether we need to allow open-ended sets (like image/*) 
>> specifically, or just closed sets. I do wonder whether the ability to 
>> say "I'd like an image; don't care what format you use, even if I've 
>> never heard of it" is useful in a Web services context.
>
> The use case I had in mind was to allow all the image formats that are 
> well-know, standard and well-supported. If an unknown format is sent 
> this would result in some sort of app level fault. Another alternative 
> is to enumerate the various formats that are supported. E.g., 
> "image/jpeg image/png ..."

If enumeration is good enough, can't we tell people to define their own 
schema for a well-known attribute, as Gudge outlined? IIRC lack of 
support for /* was the only downside of that approach.

--
Mark Nottingham   Principal Technologist
Office of the CTO   BEA Systems