RE: Internet Media Type for DFXP

At 14:37  -0400 9/08/05, Philippe Le Hegaret wrote:
>On Tue, 2005-08-09 at 18:15 +0000, Dave Singer wrote:
>>  At 14:06  -0400 9/08/05, Glenn A. Adams wrote:
>>  >Thanks for this comment. We will define a media type in the
>>  >specification, which I expect will most likely be
>>  >"application/xml+ttaf". We will take any necessary follow up steps to
>>  >register with IANA.
>>  >
>>  >Regards,
>>  >Glenn
>>
>>  For a timed text spec., wouldn't text/ be more appropriate?
>
>Not unless your format is plain text. The next version of RFC 3023
>(defining text/xml and application/xml) will deprecate the use of
>text/xml.
>
>Philippe

OK, I'll defer.

But at the IETF last week I had an interesting side conversation on 
this one.  It seems that for most media types, we express what is 
presented, not how it is represented.  So we have video/mpeg4, not 
huffmancompressedinteger/mpeg4.  What's important is what you are 
going to get, not how it is carried.  I think that it's important for 
the terminal to know that the presentation output of this is text, so 
(for example) it can be read by a screen reader, styled locally, 
enlarged and so on for those with vision problems, indexed by text 
indexers and search agents, and so on. All this is lost if it is 
labelled as application/.

I find this nonsensical, the idea that a text/ can be presented as 
plain text and ignore the actual format.  (Which anything written in 
XML can be, anyway, of course).
-- 
David Singer
Apple Computer/QuickTime

Received on Tuesday, 9 August 2005 18:43:56 UTC