Re: The 'image/svg+xml' Media Type

On Tuesday, June 18, 2002, 12:00:31 AM, Dave wrote:


DH> On Mon, Jun 17, 2002 at 09:51:11PM +0200, Chris Lilley wrote:
>> On Monday, June 17, 2002, 10:22:04 PM, Dave wrote:
>> 
>> DH> I'd be interested to know whether the W3C has any intention of
>> DH> submitting an Internet-Draft for this media type in the near future;
>> 
>> Yes, and we are discussing the issues around that.

DH> Thank you, this is good to hear.

>> DH> if not would anyone be unhappy about it happening independently of
>> DH> the W3C? ;o)
>> 
>> Yes, very unhappy. Especially if you added a mandatory charset that
>> has not been needed for image/* types, thus making the entirety of SVG
>> usage either non-conformant or broken, at a stroke.

DH> Yes, I too would be unhappy if the SVG media type had 'charset' as a
DH> required parameter.  (I merely sought views on whether it could be an
DH> optional parameter.)

If its optional and not present, then application/xml has some rather
unworkable ideas for the results. So, its better not to be allowed, in
fact.

DH> Please appreciate why I raised the subject -- SVG is becoming
DH> increasingly popular, SVG 1.0 has been a W3C Recommendation for quite
DH> some time, and there's been very little information on whether anyone is
DH> registering a media type for it.

I appreciate your concern. Sorry, we thought that "The MIME type for
SVG is "image/svg+xml" (see [RFC3023]). The W3C will register this
MIME type around the time when SVG is approved as a W3C
Recommendation." gave everyone the information they needed.
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/intro.html#MIMEType

Also, in the future, W3C specifications will be expected to develop
the MIME registration at the same time as the specification itself;
to list it as a normative appendix so it gets the same review as the
rest of the specification. We would also like to see the appendix
accepted as a registration document by IANA.

Hopefully this will break the deadlock whereby

1) x- media types are discouraged
2) media types must be registered before use
3) media types ned to referencea stable document, ir a Rec
4) to get to Rec, you need to show implementation experience at candidate rec
5) to show interoperable implementations, you need a mime type
6) goto 1

-- 
 Chris                            mailto:chris@w3.org

Received on Tuesday, 18 June 2002 08:27:29 UTC