Re: {agenda} HTML WG telcon 2010-04-01: action items, decision policy update, issue status

On 30.03.2010 23:05, Sam Ruby wrote:
> ...
> Time permitting, can you add an agenda item to discuss cross-working
> group MIME type coordination?
>
> Since I have been named as co-chair, I've been consistently against
> "active development of two incompatible vocabularies being served with
> the same media type and being defined in the same XML namespace"[1]
>
> Yet, more recently, we've been informed[2], in a way that makes it sound
> like a fait accompli, that changes are being made to the remaining XHTML
> specs to do exactly that.
> ...

+1

We talked about this shortly on the telco. Below a somewhat extended 
version of what I had to say:

 From a standards point of view, new documents (be it NOTEs or RECs) 
about text/html are *irrelevant*, until the media type registration is 
updated as well.

The text/html media type currently is defined in RFC 2854 
(<http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2854>). That document points to various 
documents that had been the latest-and-greatest as of 2000, such as HTML 
4.01 and XHTML 1.0.

The change controller for text/html is:

    Author/Change controller:
       The HTML specification is a work product of the World Wide Web
       Consortium's HTML Working Group.  The W3C has change control over
       the HTML specification.

...so it's up to the W3C to decide how to update the registration. 
However, to actually do that, the IANA registration for text/html will 
have to be modified to point to a new document, obsoleting RFC 2854.

As far as I can tell, the HTML WG is planning to do exactly that. 
There's some disagreement about how *exactly* this should be done, but, 
as far as I can tell, there is consensus that there should be a single 
document (or part of a larger document) being the "entry point" for the 
media type definition.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Friday, 2 April 2010 13:21:00 UTC