Re: Content negotiation and MIME registration procedures

> Reply-to: masinter@parc.xerox.com,koen@win.tue.nl,hedlund@best.com,ses@tipper.oit.unc.edu

> Could I ask those of you involved in 'content negotiation' to review

> 	draft-ietf-822ext-mime-reg-02.txt

> to see if you have any comments about the proposed revised MIME
> registration procedures for charset values and media types in general?
> I believe of the primary motivations for the revision of the
> registration procedures has been the demands of web applications.

The demands of Web applications have of course been considered, but I would not
characterize this as the primary reason for changing these procedures.

The motivation for revising the content-type registration procedure is actually
pretty simple: The current procedure does not work! There's nothing specific to
the Web, email, or any other aspect of the Internet here -- its equally
disfunctional for all comers ;-) I don't think anyone disagrees with my
assessment on this point -- certainly not anyone who has tried to register
something...

Furthermore, the procedure laid out in this draft is NOT in its final form.
Expect a MAJOR revision of it within the next month. (I'm waiting on
substantive input from the Application Area Directors before digging into this
morass again.)

As for character set registration, the revisions are mostly to tighten things
up and make the process work better, based on past experience. The situation
here isn't nearly as grim as it is for content types, of course. It was pretty
clear what the problems were, but Dan Connolly's "character sets considered
harmful" draft and the discussions that preceeded and followed it were
particularly helpful in clarifying how to deal with the various issues.

The resulting registration procedure for character sets is now fairly complete
and no major revisions are expected. Comments are welcome, of course.

I should also point out that procedures for registering
content-transfer-encodings as well as message/external-body access types are
specified in this document. This is all new stuff -- these procedures were
never documented before.

The proper places to discuss these matters are probably on either the ietf-822
list or the ietf-types list. (Preferably not on both, however.)

Note that if this document is adopted it will be a proposed standard. There is
far too much new stuff to even think about a recycle at draft. The rest of the
MIME document set hopefully will recycle at draft, however.

> Currently, the notes I have are:

> http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/hypermail/1995q4/0289.html
> http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/hypermail/1995q4/0347.html

Larry, let me clarify that these notes are in regards to content negotiation,
not type and character set registration matters. (Maybe this was clear to
other folks, but it confused me.)

				Ned

Received on Tuesday, 19 December 1995 02:11:14 UTC