Re: URIs for media types

Hello Erik,

On 2011/03/09 9:40, Erik Wilde wrote:
> 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.

I agree that for areas such as the Semantic Web, it's worthwhile. I also 
agree that the effort required may be rather low (for us) if you 
volunteer to do it.

I would note that there is currently somewhat less enthusiasm for having 
such URIs at (potentially) servable/served locations, because of the 
recurring tough experiences that W3C has had with unintended but 
clueless DOS attacks on their HTML DTDs. (See e.g. 
http://www.w3.org/blog/systeam/2008/02/08/w3c_s_excessive_dtd_traffic.)

Regards,   Martin.

-- 
#-# Martin J. Dürst, Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-# http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp   mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp

Received on Wednesday, 9 March 2011 07:59:12 UTC