RE: tag: uri scheme

MIME multipart made an explicit decision to require explicit
content-type rather than rely on file extensions.   Other
serializations might have some default inference mechanism,
some way to extend the inference mechanism (e.g., by file
extension, as is necessary with ftp:), explicitly define a 
content-type (e.g., in some package metadata or per-file
metadata), or limit package content to a set of well known
content types.

I think these are all elements of the serialization choice;
the main idea is to look at the data model and the requirements
and make sure there's a consistent mapping.

I'm not sure about 'authoring might be more complicated',
though. The author/sender/creator of a package has a lot more
insight about the types of the components of the package
than the recipient, and if there's any guesswork to be
done, putting the burden on the author would seem to be more
stable and effective for the overall communication system.

Larry




-----Original Message-----
From: Boris Zbarsky [mailto:bzbarsky@MIT.EDU] 
Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2009 7:04 PM
To: Larry Masinter
Cc: Marcos Caceres; public-pkg-uri-scheme@w3.org; public-webapps@w3.org; Tim Kindberg
Subject: Re: tag: uri scheme

Larry Masinter wrote:
> Yes, using Zip is a different overall serialization than 
> MIME multipart, but aren't the problem spaces similar enough
> that differences from what is already widespread practice?

MIME multipart would have the side benefit of specifying MIME types.  At 
the same time, authoring might be a little more complicated...

-Boris

Received on Thursday, 22 January 2009 03:13:40 UTC