Re: Draft Proposal for Assigning Media Types

Umit,

Thanks for the proposal. A few comments;

* It seems like there's a lot of SOAP/WSDL/MTOM-specific language and 
rationale in this draft. Although I understand this work is motivated 
by Web services, it's critical that any mechanism like this gets the 
broadest possible adoption, so that Web services stacks can leverage 
this information in any XML it comes across, not just those that have 
been born (and will die) in a controlled SOAP message exchange.

* Some rationale needs to be given as to why only media types, instead 
of content types, are addressed.

* The document refers to problems with using URIs in the content of the 
mediaType attribute. What are they?

* The acceptableMediaTypes attribute effectively defines a protocol. 
This seems very application-specific, hides a lot of information in 
ways that isn't accessible to XML tools, and reproduces a number of 
problems that are already evident in HTTP content negotiation. Why is 
it necessary to define this mechanism at all, when it's just as viable 
to use Schema to constrain what values are acceptable (for example)?

* Section four appears to define a new type of Information Item. Is 
this really necessary? Indeed, why is this section necessary at all?

Cheers,

--
Mark Nottingham   Principal Technologist
Office of the CTO   BEA Systems

Received on Friday, 6 February 2004 20:02:16 UTC