URIs for media types

• From: Larry Masinter <LMM@acm.org>
• Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 15:03:22 -0700
• To: "'Dan Connolly'" <connolly@w3.org>, "'Eric Hellman'" <eric@openly.com>
• Cc: uri@w3.org
• Message-id: <001701c38f7a$57917b40$c3432099@MasinterT40>

One caution: many people think they want a URI to talk about
a "media type" (like 'text/html') when, on examination, their
application actually needs to know a "content-type string"
(like 'text/html;charset=iso-8859-1').

On examination, it seems that there are many cases where
specifications confuse the two concepts and quite a number
more that need the latter rather than the former.

While it's easy to imagine constructing "http://iana.org"
URIs whose resources bear some descriptive relationship
to the former, it's harder to figure out how to encode
the latter. Thus, the motivation for the Eastlake draft.


Larry

Received on Friday, 10 October 2003 20:03:30 UTC