Re: [web-annotation] Dropping type from ... what?

I like Tim's suggestion to use MIME types instead of dctypes, for a 
few reasons:
* It prevents the duplication of information (MIME types in the 
headers, and dctypes in the annotation); duplication of information, 
especially when it can get out of sync, it dangerous; as Tim 
described, a mismatched dctype could easily be chosen
* It reuses a well-known and predictable mechanism that is universal 
to the Web and the Internet, rather than an RDF/LD-specific mechanism
* It helps with direct processing (again, as Tim said).

If content negotiation is necessary, we could perhaps allow multiple 
values; this is going to be set by the UA (usually the client) anyway,
 not the user, so it can easily establish the correct MIME type when 
the resource is inserted.

I would go farther than Tim, and suggest that dctype not be included 
in the spec; if others want to use it, or any other custom property, 
they are free to do so, but having it in the spec encourages its use, 
which I suspect is a bad pattern.

Stian mentions the case of a YouTube video, and makes the claim that 
it's a video, not an HTML page; but that's not correct, that URL he 
provided points to an HTML page that contains a video, and we 
shouldn't stray from the Web in this abstracted way. We cannot hope 
for interoperability in that behavior, unless the UA forces the user 
to select the dctype (how would the user choose?), or unless we 
somehow mandate that UAs consistently chooses the media dctype when 
presented with mixed-MIME-type resources (like HTML pages with videos 
or images) and always. I simply don't see how we can realistically use
 dctypes in a helpful way, while MIME types are clearly and 
pragmatically useful. 


-- 
GitHub Notif of comment by shepazu
See 
https://github.com/w3c/web-annotation/issues/67#issuecomment-135261833

Received on Thursday, 27 August 2015 02:38:30 UTC