Re: URIs for media types

hello john.

> So I'd go with URIs of that form, and just live with the fact that not
> all of them resolve to descriptive documents, as XML folks live with
> the fact that not all namespace URIs do.

reading some of the old discussions of the TAG i want to stress that i 
was not suggesting that the IANA should promise to always have a web 
server running that serves RDF or some other machine-readable format. 
what i am suggesting is merely to have a little add-on to the media type 
registration process that makes it safe to assume that if two parties 
use URIs to identify media types (for example because they want to mix 
IANA's media type vocabulary with another one and want to mix them in a 
safe way), then there is one well-defined way how to identify an IANA 
media type by URI. it may be as simple as saying, as you propose: "go 
ahead everybody and use 
http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/TYPE/SUBTYPE, and we will do 
our best to even have a web server there serving 
[HTML|XML|JSON|RDF|SKOS]." i think there's quite a bit of value in 
officially declaring this, and the effort required seems fairly low.

cheers,

dret.

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erik wilde | mailto:dret@berkeley.edu  -  tel:+1-510-6432253 |
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Received on Wednesday, 9 March 2011 00:40:59 UTC