Re: tag: uri scheme

Larry Masinter wrote:
> 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.

That strongly depends on the relative numbers of authors and recipients, 
their relative cluefulness, and their relative resource availability... 
  For example, if your authors will largely tend to get their MIME types 
wrong and there are lots of them and there are only three possible 
recipients, all of whom are willing to put in the sort of work the 
authors aren't, the tradeoff might lie on just having the recipients deal.

This is not to say that the tradeoff might not fall the other way too, 
but authoring certainly _is_ more complicated if authors have to choose 
their types themselves (witness HTTP, where by and large the whole thing 
doesn't work very well).  That might be a sacrifice that's worth it in 
the interests of other things, naturally.

-Boris

Received on Thursday, 22 January 2009 03:37:02 UTC